Editorial: Absent New START, we need a new nuclear arms treaty

When Americans — when any Westerners — find themselves in agreement with the reasonable, nuanced tone of Vladimir V. Putin on a sensitive international issue, you know the world has gone topsy-turvy.

Yet that is the case facing the West this week.

The New START treaty, versions of which have kept the world safe from nuclear catastrophe for generations, expired last Thursday. In the lead-up, the Russian president casually suggested the 15-year-old agreement be informally extended while the United States and Russia negotiate a successor.

It sounds like a sensible idea. While not legally binding under international law, a “handshake agreement” would maintain stability, given that the dangers of nuclear war cannot be overstated.

But the Trump White House declined the handshake.

Instead, the administration sent Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security Thomas G. DiNanno to Switzerland to address the Conference on Disarmament. The treaty “placed unilateral constraints on the United States that were unacceptable,” DiNanno told the assembly.

The former treaty limited the number of deployed nuclear weapons to roughly 1,550 for each side. Now that limit is gone, and the world is consequently less safe.

It would be naive, however, to ignore the strategic value of this “tough-guy” stance. It is no surprise to see the current White House taking this approach to international relations. Russia, for all the surface-level reasonableness of Putin’s offer, has a poor track record of sticking to the letter of the law. During the first Trump administration, the U.S. withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty citing Russian violations. The prudence of those moves was defensible; a treaty is a hollow vessel when the Kremlin flagrantly violates it.

Yet the danger remains that the administration may use this vacuum to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal. For the past half-century, starting with the Nixon administration, both Republican and Democratic presidents have worked to ratchet down the nuclear tensions that peaked during the 1950s and ‘60s. That concerted diplomacy created a world where our primary fear was no longer a catastrophic exchange between superpowers.

Younger generations — including the 40-somethings now setting national strategy — cannot be expected to remember the stress of “duck and cover” drills or families building backyard bomb shelters. That is not a healthy way for Americans to live.

White House watchers, according to an analysis by David E. Sanger and William J. Broad of The New York Times, say Washington is actively weighing the deployment of more nuclear weapons and a possible return to nuclear testing. Russia and China are also developing new classes of nuclear weaponry.

The White House is right to insist that Beijing, which boasts the world’s fastest-growing nuclear program, be brought to the table. But returning to nuclear testing would inject radical new tensions into a world that has benefited from a fragile nuclear peace since 1945.

Cooler heads must prevail. A nuclear arms race is ultimately in the interest of no one.