This essay is a critical analysis of the growing global nuclear weapons threat and the flaws of nuclear deterrence theory. It reviews the recent expiration of the New START treaty, which was the last remaining international agreement on the limitation of nuclear weapons, and proposals in the U.S. to resume nuclear weapons testing and deploy additional warheads on nuclear weapons systems. The essay is a call to action, to enhance public awareness and mobilize citizen pressure to halt and reverse the arms race.
The risk of nuclear war is greater now than in decades—and rising. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently moved its famous doomsday clock closer to midnight, indicating a growing risk of nuclear war. UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council last year that “geopolitical tensions and mistrust have escalated the risk of nuclear warfare to its highest point in decades.” Not since the worst years of the Cold War has the world faced such an acute risk of nuclear weapons use.
In the 1980s, when U.S. and Soviet nuclear stockpiles rose to alarming levels, massive waves of disarmament protest arose in Europe and the United States, pressuring political leaders to negotiate for arms reduction. The Cold War ended, and many people stopped worrying about the bomb.
Today, the bomb is back. The last remaining agreement limiting U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons, New START, has expired. Nuclear weapons have spread to other countries, including Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. China is rapidly increasing its nuclear arsenal. European leaders are discussing an expanded the role for nuclear weapons in East-West security. A new global peace movement is needed to stop further nuclear madness and create pressure for arms reduction and disarmament.
Weapons of self-destruction
Political leaders and security experts speak of nuclear weapons as if they were mere pieces on a chessboard, to be brandished and maneuvered for strategic advantage. We are told that nuclear weapons are necessary to guarantee peace, but there can be no genuine peace when security is based on the threat of using weapons of indiscriminate mass annihilation.
U.S. officials play a numbers game, claiming that more weapons are necessary to keep up with rivals. They fail to mention that the U.S. and Russia already have 1550 deployed nuclear weapons each. The use of even a small fraction of these weapons would completely destroy the other country and would have catastrophic consequences globally.
One large bomb detonated over a modern city could kill millions of people, from the horrific blast effects and the spread of genetically damaging radioactive fallout. Atmospheric soot from the explosion of nuclear weapons could devastate the Earth’s climate and undermine the biosphere’s life support systems. A major scientific study found that more than 2 billion people could die from a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and that more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia.
Nuclear deterrence does not bring peace. Nuclear weapons stockpiles have not prevented major wars by Russia in Ukraine, nor by the U.S. in Iraq and Vietnam. The number of armed conflicts in the world today is at an all-time high. The supposed deterrent effect of nuclear weapons lacks credibility. In 1969 President Richard Nixon called the idea of starting World War III to defend European allies “a lot of crap.” Deterrence is achievable by non-nuclear means, British scholar Mary Kaldor reminds us. Wars can be avoided by strengthening global cooperation and applying proven methods of conflict prevention and peacemaking diplomacy.
Arms racing
Leaders in Washington ignore these realities and are pushing forward with a massive program to rebuild the U.S. nuclear arsenal. At an estimated cost of $2 trillion over a period of 30 years, the U.S. is constructing an entirely new fleet of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, 14 new ballistic missile-firing submarines each with 24 missile launchers, new strategic aircraft and air-launched cruise missiles, a new system of sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles and enormous new facilities to produce plutonium components for an estimated 80 new nuclear warheads per year.
This enormous nuclear program is euphemistically termed “modernization” in Washington, but it is more properly understood as a program for enhancing the capacity to wage nuclear war. “A nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought,” U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared in the 1980s. Political leaders often repeat the phrase, but their actions belie their words.
Nuclear arms control agreements previously impeded unconstrained arms racing, but those protections were progressively discarded in recent decades and are gone completely now. With the expiration of New Start, the Union of Concerned Scientists warns, the U.S. and Russia could double their stockpiles of deployed nuclear weapons in a few years.
A preventable crisis
The current increased risk of nuclear escalation was completely avoidable. In September 2025, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to voluntarily maintain the limits of the New START treaty. “Russia is prepared to continue observing the treaty’s central quantitative restrictions for one year after Feb. 5, 2026.” Trump said Putin’s offer “sounds like a good idea” to him, but he refused to respond to Russia’s offer.
An accelerated arms race could be prevented if Washington and Moscow would agree to mutual nuclear restraint, as suggested in Moscow’s September overture. Trump has proposed instead the negotiation of “a new, improved, and modernized Treaty” with Russia. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others have insisted that negotiations for a new treaty include China. Forging a new treaty could take years of complicated negotiation, and the inclusion of China would be a complete nonstarter from Beijing’s perspective. Trump’s proposal creates the semblance of an interest in arms control while doing nothing to prevent an imminent arms race.
The immediate need is for Washington and Moscow to agree on maintaining current strategic weapons limits. Moscow expressed regret that Washington did not accept its offer to maintain weapons restrictions, but it did not withdraw the proposal. The deal is still on the table. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov reiterated on February 11 that Moscow will continue to adhere to the recently expired New START treaty as long as the U.S. does not exceed the limits.
A U.S.-Russia understanding to stay within current strategic weapons limits would be a modest but important mutual step that could reduce the near-term threat of nuclear escalation. It would create a positive atmosphere for negotiating a new arms reduction treaty. Ideally it could also lead to a statement of support for the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, as specified in the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
A call to action
Building pressure for such steps will require renewed peace activism. In the history of the arms race, progress toward weapons limitation and disarmament usually has been the result of citizen pressure and grassroots political action.
Recently, dozens of disarmament groups in the U.S. and other countries joined together to issue a global appeal to halt and reverse the nuclear arms race. It reads:
We call on the leaders of the United States and other nuclear-armed states to immediately implement a mutual and verifiable halt to the deployment and development of more nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons systems.
The groups are calling for an end to the deployment of nuclear bombs and weapons systems on all sides, including the U.S., Russia, and China. They have unified around the message “more nuclear weapons will not make the world safer.”
The appeal is an easily understandable proposition that hopefully can attract broad popular support. It can serve as the basis for organizing political pressures for a global nuclear freeze and concrete steps to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons.
About the Author
David Cortright is professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and a visiting scholar at Cornell University’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. In the 1980s he was the executive director of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.