Nearly six months ago, on Feb. 5, the New START Treaty expired, ending the last binding limit on U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. Three weeks later, the United States and Israel launched a second war against Iran, a decapitation strikethat killed the country’s supreme leader and marked a sharper escalation than their summer 2025 air campaign, in a world where no treaty capped the two largest nuclear stockpiles. That war did not stay settled. It paused in April, flared again over the Strait of Hormuz, and resumed in full this month. I think that timing deserves more attention than it has received.
This is not simply a Colorado concern, though I write as a Coloradan. My home state hosts NORAD’s command post at Cheyenne Mountain and Peterson Space Force Base, along with Fort Carson, the Air Force Academy, a huge aerospace industry, more than 330,000 veterans, and at least 54,000 armed forces retirees. Two of Colorado’s own House members, Democrat Jason Crow and Republican Jeff Crank, sit on the House Armed Services Committee. But the weight of American nuclear policy reaches across the whole American West. Minuteman III silos sit under wheat fields and prairie from Montana and North Dakota to Wyoming, Nebraska, and northeastern Colorado, run by Air Force Global Strike Command, which the House-passed defense bill just designated a center for “conventional-nuclear integration” while giving it new authority to shift funds toward the missiles’ troubled, delayed replacement, the Sentinel. New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Base, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories anchor the nation’s nuclear weapons complex. Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base and the former Nevada Test Site carry their own nuclear legacy. Washington’s Bangor submarine base on Puget Sound berths the Pacific fleet’s ballistic-missile submarines. Nuclear policy is not somebody else’s business in this region. Or anywhere else.
New START capped each side at 1,550 deployed warheads and 700 deployed delivery systems, and it required something more valuable than any number: routine, verified knowledge. On-site inspections, data exchanges, and structured communication turned claims into shared facts inside the world’s most dangerous rivalry.
Those routines broke down years before the treaty’s formal end. The U.S. and Russia suspended inspections during COVID in 2020. When Washington tried to resume them in 2022, Moscow refused. Russia formally suspended its participation in February 2023; the United States reciprocated four months later. By the time New START expired this February, the “verified” part of verified arms control had already been dead for nearly three years.
That history is significant because arms races rarely start with a declaration of rivalry. They start when both sides can no longer confirm what the other is doing, and begin planning for the worst because they can no longer test that assumption against facts. Rather than representing a a hypothetical risk, that is where the United States and Russia stand today.
Iran is a clear illustration of the pattern. In March, Reuters reported that the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director, Rafael Grossi, said the agency did not know the status of a new underground enrichment facility at Isfahan, because inspectors could no longer visit. In the same weeks, the IAEA confirmed bomb damage at Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant using satellite imagery, because it had no other way left to confirm it. That is what verification failure looks like on the ground: the loss of the tools that let anyone tell a crisis from a rumor.
Arms-control skeptics in Washington will say treaties never stopped Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and they are right about the fact but wrong about the conclusion. That history proves guardrails are not cures, not that they are useless. Guardrails matter most when nobody wants to test them, and the world is testing them now, whether it intended to or not. Days ago, a Vatican-hosted assembly of Nobel laureates warned that letting artificial intelligence into nuclear decision-making could strip away even that hesitation.
This week, Saudi Arabia signed a civilian nuclear deal with the United States that may let it enrich uranium on its own soil. When the United States struck a similar deal with the United Arab Emirates in 2009, it demanded tougher terms, including no enrichment rights and full IAEA inspection access, which became, according to the UAE’s American embassy, nonproliferation’s “gold standard.” Saudi Arabia may get a weaker deal, negotiated in the middle of a war fought explicitly to keep Iran from enriching uranium at all. Diplomats call it a reversal of decades of American nonproliferation policy. I call it another guardrail coming down, this time by choice.
The danger does not stop at Washington and Moscow. China’s arsenal, now approaching 620 warheads, is growing faster than any other nation’s and has never joined a verification framework of any kind. Allies are noticing the frayed guarantees, too. Japan’s defense minister said this month that his country “cannot avoid” debating whether to build its own weapons, and a recent poll found 76 percent of South Koreans now favor an independent nuclear arsenal. Finland’s parliament voted in June to allow nuclear weapons onto its soil, and France’s president has ordered an increase in his country’s warhead count. In Germany, debates about an independent nuclear deterrent, a once unthinkable idea in that nation, have resurfaced. Trust erodes slowly, but it rebuilds far more slowly, if at all. And allies plan around behavior they have observed instead of on the basis of promises that Washington offers.
Congress has not helped. In 2025, lawmakers cut $185 million from federal nuclear nonproliferation programs, the unglamorous work of securing nuclear material and detecting smuggling, while nuclear weapons production budgets grew. The pattern continued into the 2027 budget request, which slashes nonproliferation programs by a further 10 percent and zeroes out the program that disposes of surplus weapons plutonium. That is exactly backward at a moment when the world needs more of that work, not less.
The defense bill the House passed this week makes the pattern more evident. It stretches Congress’s own review of the nuclear weapons enterprise from every two years to every four, trading away routine oversight at home in the same season Washington complains about losing it abroad. The House Rules Committee, in the same bill, blocked a floor vote on requiring congressional authorization before further military action against Iran, even as that war resumes. Oversight that Congress will not use is not oversight at all. While President Trump called on the day New START expired for a “new, improved, and modernized” treaty, and his administration has since floated multilateral arms-control talks with Russia and China, no agreement has followed. An invitation is not a guardrail.
I am not arguing for nostalgia about the Cold War arms-control era. I am arguing for risk management. Rebuilding even partial visibility into Russia’s arsenal through data exchanges and predictable communication does not require a grand new treaty. Treating verification as a strategic asset, not a diplomatic nicety, would help. So would steady, consistent behavior toward allies who are watching for signs of American resolve, and toward rivals who are watching for signs of American intent.
None of this guarantees safety. But New START’s expiration marks a world with looser restraints, thinner trust, and less time to react in a crisis, and that combination is how catastrophic risk grows. It rarely arrives as one dramatic choice. The question is not only for Washington. It is for the lawmakers who represent Cheyenne Mountain, the missile fields of Montana and Wyoming, and the labs at Los Alamos and Sandia. They should ask themselves whether they want to rebuild verification while it is still a choice or wait until a crisis leaves no choice at all.
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