Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
The next major bilateral treaty to collapse was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned ground-launched missiles with ranges between three hundred and ten miles and three thousand and four hundred miles. The U.S. had long accused Russia of failure to comply with the treaty, with the Obama administration finding that a cruise missile tested by Russia in 2014 violated the treaty's range limits. The Trump administration announced that it would withdraw from the treaty in October 2018, with Russia responding that is would also do so.
These bilateral arms control treaties reduced the number of warheads from a peak of over sixty thousand when the INF treaty was signed in 1987 to less than ten thousand when New START was signed in 2011.
In addition to Russia's alleged violations of the INF treaty, the Trump administration mentioned China's failure to participate and the need to prepare for a possible conflict in the Southern Pacific.
China's planned expansion of its nuclear arsenal poses an obstacle to nuclear negotiations that did not exist during the Cold War, when non-American and Soviet arsenals were small enough to safely ignore. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. connected the prospects of a new nuclear agreement with Russia to the idea that China should join New START or another trilateral nuclear treaty. In 2023, the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the U.S. found that the United States “will no longer be able to treat the Chinese nuclear threat as a ‘lesser included case’ of the Russian nuclear threat.”
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China is expanding its nuclear forces and may have deployed “a small number of its nuclear warheads” in 2023. It is expected to continue increasing its nuclear arsenal over the next decade and could match U.S. or Russian numbers of deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles by 2034, although its overall number of warheads would remain lower.
Whether the world will experience a massive increase in the number of warheads stockpiled and deployed if New START is allowed to expire without a replacement remains unclear. Daryl Kimball is the head of the Arms Control Association (ACA). He said that the U.S. and Russia have more efficient ways to increase the size of their deployed arsenals. Following the expiration of the treaty, “they will both have the capacity to double the number of deployed warheads by ‘uploading’.” This means increasing the number of nuclear warheads present on delivery systems that are already deployed.
Pranay Vaddi is the U.S. National Security Council's senior director for arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. He says that while the United States must be prepared for the constraints set out in New START to “disappear without replacement,” the U.S. does not “need to increase [its] nuclear forces to match or outnumber the combined total of [its] competitors.”
Considering the U.S.’s existing second-strike capability, it would seem that more is not necessarily better. Just one submarine out of between eight and ten at sea at any time carries some 100 warheads. This is enough to “obliterate a large country and kill many tens of millions of people,” according to Kimball.
Please read Part 3 next