It’s Time for a New Nuclear Posture Review
By Robert Peters
April 12, 2023
With Vladimir Putin’s announcement that Russia is suspending its New START treaty obligations, the United States is entering a new era in international relations, where the United States and Russia have no active arms control agreements. Or perhaps it is the reemergence of an old era of international relations—the era of Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. For the opening decades of the Cold War, nuclear powers were unlimited in their ability to build and deploy nuclear weapons.
While some argue that Russia’s suspension of the New START treaty is an opportunity to think about the treaty that comes after New START, the prospects for nuclear arms control, for the foreseeable future, are extremely low. They should be for good reason.
The 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) calls out arms control as one of the central pillars of its comprehensive, balanced approach to reducing nuclear risks. Indeed, the NPR correctly states that “expiration of the treaty without a follow-on agreement would leave Russia free to expand strategic nuclear forces.” This is problematic for the United States because the United States simply does not have the capacity to match a Russian expansion.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/04/12/its_time_for_a_new_nuclear_posture_review_893258.html
