New START Treaty Lapses Amid Last-Minute, Unratified U.S.–Russia Abu Dhabi Talks

The sudden absence of a bilateral ceiling echoes the May 2002 U.S. exit from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which likewise removed a keystone without a ready replacement and accelerated missile-defence R&D. Historically, major-power arms-control ‘vacations’—from the 1936 collapse of the Washington Naval treaties to the 1979–1985 freeze of SALT II—have invariably been followed by quantitative or qualitative arms races. This moment fits a 30-year pattern of treaty erosion (ABM 2002, INF 2019) driven less by ideology than by multipolar pressures: China’s rapid build-up, emerging hypersonic and orbital delivery systems, and verification disputes in a sanctions-fragmented world. Over a 100-year horizon, New START’s lapse may matter less for immediate warhead numbers—both sides already stockpiled over 1,900 reserve warheads—than for the loss of the data-exchange and inspection habits that underpinned crisis stability since 1991. Re-institutionalising transparency in a tri- or quad-polar nuclear order will now be harder than matching warheads; history suggests that once routine trust-building mechanisms die, they take a generation to resurrect, if they return at all.