The meeting of Presidents Trump and Putin in Alaska this week presents a rare and urgent opening for both leaders to make tangible progress on nuclear arms control, IST Senior Policy Advisor Sahil V. Shah and co-author IMEMO RAS research fellow Dmitry Stefanovich argue in Politico.
“The last remaining agreement limiting the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals — the New START Treaty — is set to expire next February. When that happens, for the first time in over half a century, U.S. and Russian strategic weapons could be entirely unconstrained, and both countries’ militaries will plan their future nuclear posture based on worst-case estimates of each other’s arsenals,” they write.
The authors present six steps that would restore predictability, put a floor under potential strategic freefall, and help avert a costly new arms race.
