US Accuses China of 2020 Nuclear Test as New START Dies

History rhymes: arms-control frameworks also collapsed after SALT II died in 1979, sparking the 1980s Euromissile build-up before the 1987 INF Treaty restored limits. Today’s unraveling—INF (2019), Open Skies (2020), CTBT’s stagnation, and now New START—signals a systemic shift from bilateral US-Soviet guardrails to a multipolar, technology-driven era where hypersonics, AI and space defenses muddy deterrence calculus. The immediate accusations mirror 1963’s clandestine Soviet tests that goaded Washington into the Limited Test Ban, but this time neither side seems eager for new legal constraints. If a binding multilateral regime fails to materialize, the next century could see a diffusion of nuclear capability and automation similar to how the machine gun and aircraft proliferated after 1914—making miscalculation, not deliberate attack, the likelier path to catastrophe. The moment matters because once verification norms and mutual confidence are lost, rebuilding them—like the 1991 START talks that took 9 years—can take a geopolitical generation.