"" If it expires, it expires " is a reasonable way to manage a week-old gallon of milk-not a treaty designed to stave off a potentially apocalyptic nuclear conflict between Russia and the US And yet, this was President Trump's response when asked about the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which lapses today. It was the last nuclear arms agreement between the two countries."
"For the first time since the Cold War, we find ourselves in a world without constraints on nuclear proliferation among global superpowers. It is no wonder the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded by Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1947, has shifted its symbolic Doomsday Clock to the closest it has ever been to midnight: just 85 seconds."
President Trump's remark that New START can simply "expire" coincides with the treaty's lapse, ending the last bilateral nuclear arms agreement between the United States and Russia. The lapse returns the world to a state without formal constraints on superpower nuclear arsenals and aligns with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moving the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight. Arms-control efforts from SALT and the 1972 ABM Treaty through the INF (1987) and START I (1991) drove major reductions. New START, signed in 2011 and renewed in 2021, capped strategic warheads at 1,550 per side. These accords contributed to a fall in global stockpiles from about 70,300 in 1986 to roughly 12,300 today.
Read at The Nation
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