Nuclear war-fear: No treaties, no trust, no time

The bomb never went away. We just stopped paying attention.

For thirty years, nuclear weapons were treated as background noise in American strategic discourse – too big to ignore outright, too dangerous to dwell on. Arms control became a legacy concern. Disarmament became a moral abstraction. And nuclear policy, once the crucible of grand strategy, was quietly handed off to the bureaucracy. The Cold War had ended, the superpowers had stood down, and the prevailing wisdom was that the logic of mutual assured destruction had served its purpose.

That era is over.

We are now entering the most dangerous phase of the nuclear age since its inception – more volatile than the Cold War, more complex than the post-9/11 era, and more underappreciated than either. The quiet collapse of nuclear arms control is not merely a policy failure. It is the unraveling of one of the few strategic regimes that had actually worked.

The expiration of New START in 2026 will remove the last remaining legal cap on U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals. No verification mechanisms. No inspection regimes. No agreed-upon ceilings. What remains is a brittle and unregulated competition between two heavily armed nuclear states with deteriorating trust and dangerously outdated assumptions. And if anyone in Washington believes the Kremlin will simply choose not to surge production of new warheads and delivery systems in the absence of treaty limits, they are deluding themselves.

But the real problem isn’t just the loss of bilateral control between the United States and Russia. It’s that the strategic architecture built during the Cold War – based on a relatively simple dyad of adversaries, both steeped in the logic of deterrence – no longer fits the world we inhabit. This is not Cold War 2.0. This is something worse.

China is no longer content with a minimal deterrent. It is building a modern nuclear triad, with road-mobile ICBMs, ballistic missile submarines, and stealth bombers. It is deploying hypersonic glide vehicles designed to evade U.S. missile defenses. It is expanding its fissile material production and building new silos in its western deserts. But unlike Washington and Moscow, Beijing operates with deliberate opacity – no transparency, no arms control dialogue, and no doctrine the U.S. can reliably interpret. That makes the new Chinese arsenal not just larger, but more dangerous.

Elsewhere, India is modernizing its deterrent with a focus on survivable second-strike capabilities. Pakistan, still governed by a fragile and increasingly radicalized regime, remains locked in a hair-trigger standoff with New Delhi. North Korea has demonstrated operational ICBMs, tested submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and openly declared its readiness to use nuclear weapons preemptively. And in the Middle East, Iran continues to enrich uranium to near weapons-grade levels, edging ever closer to a breakout scenario that could shatter the regional balance and spark a cascade of proliferation from Riyadh to Ankara.

The common theme in all this isn’t just more nukes – it’s fewer constraints. The treaties are gone. The lines of communication are frayed. The old habits of dialogue, predictability, and mutual restraint have eroded. What’s emerging is not a return to Cold War stability, but a multipolar nuclear order with more players, more variables, and less shared understanding.

In that context, deterrence becomes far more precarious.

The 20th-century model of nuclear strategy was built on rational actors, clearly understood red lines, and a certain grim predictability. But none of that is guaranteed today. Different states have different thresholds for nuclear use, different political cultures, and different vulnerabilities. What deters Moscow might not deter Pyongyang. What reassures Washington might appear provocative to Beijing. And what seems stabilizing in theory – like hypersonic weapons or AI-enabled decision support systems – could prove catastrophic in practice.

Moreover, the technological environment has changed. We now operate in a world of deepfakes, spoofed satellites, cyber interference, and autonomous systems. The idea that launch decisions could be based on faulty data, manipulated feeds, or spoofed alerts is no longer hypothetical. In a crisis, the decision time could shrink from minutes to seconds. That is not a strategic environment that lends itself to cool-headed restraint.

And yet Washington remains dangerously distracted. The political class is focused on domestic spectacle. The strategic community, such as it is, obsesses over boutique theories of “integrated deterrence” and “multi-domain operations,” often with little grounding in the brute realities of nuclear conflict. Arms control is viewed as a relic. Deterrence is treated as a solved equation. And few seem willing to face the sheer unpredictability of the world we’re entering.

The Biden administration, to its credit, extended New START in 2021 – but failed to negotiate any follow-on framework. The Trump administration scrapped INF and Open Skies without offering credible alternatives. Now in his second term, President Trump is unlikely to resurrect the arms control architecture that once helped stabilize U.S. power during its Cold War peak. He may well preside over its final collapse. If that happens, the loss won’t be merely symbolic – it will be strategic. We will have traded transparency for opacity, verification for guesswork, and restraint for brinkmanship.

What would a realist strategy look like in this context?

First, it would begin by recognizing that nuclear weapons are not like other weapons. They are not just another rung on the escalation ladder. They are the ladder. Any strategy that forgets this fact is a strategy built on sand.

Second, it would prioritize rebuilding strategic communication with adversaries. Not because we trust them, but because the alternative – total uncertainty – is far worse. That means reopening structured, verifiable arms control talks with Russia, even amid ongoing tensions. It means initiating real dialogue with China, however modest, about nuclear risk reduction. And it means working with regional partners to prevent proliferation in the Middle East and South Asia – not through moral appeals, but through hard-nosed diplomacy grounded in mutual interest.

Third, it would force a rethink of U.S. nuclear posture. Launch-on-warning protocols made sense in the 1970s, but make far less sense in a world where cyber interference or spoofed data could trigger unintended escalation. Our declaratory policy must be credible, flexible, and matched to the actual nature of the threats we face – not the ghosts of past conflicts.

And finally, we need to cultivate a political class capable of thinking seriously about nuclear weapons. That means educating leaders who understand strategic stability, not just polling data. It means restoring public awareness of what is truly at stake – not just in war, but in peace. And it means remembering that civilization, in the end, rests on restraint.

The bomb is back. It never really left. What’s changed is our ability – and willingness – to manage it. If we continue down the current path, sleepwalking into a new and more dangerous arms race, we may not get a second warning. We may not get time to rebuild the guardrails.

The Cold War world had its terrors. But it also had structure, memory, and rules. The world we are entering has none of those. It has only capabilities, ambitions, and uncertainty.

And in that world, the most dangerous weapon is not the warhead – it’s complacency.

Andrew Latham, Ph.D., a tenured professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is also a Senior Washington Fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy in Ottawa and a non-resident fellow with Defense Priorities, a think tank in Washington, D.C.