Russian President Vladimir Putin indicated that he’s interested in securing a new nuclear arms control pact with the United States, raising the stakes of his Aug. 15 summit with President Donald Trump.
The world’s last remaining nuclear arms control treaty, New START, limits the U.S. and Russia to keeping only 1,550 long-range nuclear warheads on alert at any given time. It expires in February 2026, though Russia in 2022 paused and later stopped consultation meetings and ceased allowing the U.S. and NATO to inspect its nuclear arsenal.
But in recent weeks, Putin and Trump have both discussed the possibility of a successor deal. Nuclear threats have emanated from Moscow since 2022 when Russia started its war against Ukraine, which is the main topic of the summit.
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Putin suggested the summit could create “the long-term conditions of peace between our countries … and in the world as a whole, if we reach agreements in the field of strategic (nuclear) offensive arms control,” while speaking to senior Kremlin military and civilian officials at an Aug. 14 meeting.
Trump told reporters July 25 that New START’s looming expiration is “a problem for the world,” and expressed a desire to maintain the treaty’s deployment limits. The president, who has long sought to reduce the risks of nuclear weapons, tried and failed to launch three-way nuke talks with China and Russia during his first term.
A golden ‘opportunity’
A top arms control negotiations expert told USA TODAY the summit represents a major “opportunity” to rein in a potential arms race before it begins.
Paul Dean, a former acting assistant secretary of State who oversaw arms control and led the U.S. delegation to the New START implementation body, emphasized that the treaty’s enforcement measures also keep the world a safer place. Dean now leads the non-partisan Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Global Nuclear Policy Program.
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The treaty mandates on-site inspections, data exchanges, and other measures intended to allow each side to maintain an accurate picture of the other’s nuclear forces, he explained.
“Without (a high) confidence level in the day-to-day picture of what the other side’s nuclear forces are, what you really get is the potential for misinterpretation and miscalculation,” Dean said. “And when it comes to nuclear weapons, a misinterpretation or a miscalculation can be catastrophic.”
The U.S. and Russia (and the Soviet Union before it) have maintained a series of such nuclear arms control and verification agreements dating back to the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.
“Most people alive right now have never lived in a time during which there were no guardrails on the U.S.-Russia or U.S.-Soviet nuclear deterrence relationship,” noted Dean. He argued that “people have forgotten what the risks are,” including a potentially costly arms race. The “world that we’re living in is more complicated and more dangerous than it’s been in quite some time,” he said.
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The presidents could agree in Anchorage to start the negotiating process for a successor deal to New START, but Dean cautioned that “these are long negotiations and unlikely to be resolved in a matter of weeks or even months.”
But there is potential for some immediate progress to emerge from the summit, Dean said.
“Both sides could take a step back from nuclear threats and raising the nuclear temperature. Both sides could recommit themselves to implementing the New START treaty,” he said, and the two sides could agree to respect the deployment limits as negotiations unfold.
Contributing: Reuters
Davis Winkie’s role covering nuclear threats and national security at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Putin floats new nuke deal ahead of Trump summit in Alaska
