The balance of nuclear forces and the containment of weapons development have given rise to various pacts between the United States and Russia in recent decades.
Among them, the most recent is known as the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start, for its acronym in English). This agreement is precisely the one that Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Tuesday that he has decided to suspend.
He did so during the speech he gave before the Federal Assembly of his country, the first since he ordered the military invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
The first Arms Reduction Treaty dates back more than three decades.
The decomposition of the Soviet Union reconfigured relations between Washington and Moscow and, after the pulse of the Cold War, it was time for certain gestures, also in terms of weapons.
The initial text signed between the two military powers in 1991 underpinned successive attempts and renewals that reached their peak in 2010, when Barack Obama, then president of the United States, and Dimitri Medveded, holding the political reins of Russia at the time, signed the third version of Start.
The agreement entered into force the following year and establishes a more ambitious limit than that of previous agreements by limiting to 1,550 the nuclear warheads that the two countries can have deployed. However, despite the fact that the two parties exchanged acid criticism in recent years, technically they had agreed to extend these commitments until February 2026.
Guarantees and transparency
The treaty contemplates guarantees in terms of inspections and transparency, to the extent that each of the two signatory powers needs to be clear that the other is fulfilling its part.
The US Department of State collects on its website data from September 2022 that support said compliance: with 1,420 warheads by the United States and 1,549 in the case of Russia.
However, last January the Joe Biden government accused Moscow of breaching the agreed terms, by vetoing the presence of inspectors in its territories after the theoretical return to normality after a phase of paralysis due to the Covid-19 pandemic and already with the military offensive in Ukraine in full swing.
Arsenals, out of control?
A hypothetical rupture of the New Start would imply that the arsenals of the two largest nuclear powers in the world would have no limitations for the first time since the 1970s, during the Cold War.
Vladimir Putin announced on Tuesday the suspension of Russia’s participation, clarifying that for now it is not an “abandonment”.
The Russian president brandished the nuclear threat on several occasions since he gave the order to start the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This Tuesday he assured that Russia “must be prepared to carry out nuclear tests if the United States carries them out first.”