There was a festive atmosphere in the bright Spanish Hall of Prague Castle in spring 2010.
Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev smiled at each other and signed two big safeguards that would make the world safer.
– This is an important first step, said Obama.
The New Start agreement was signed. There was hope that the number of nuclear weapons would decrease worldwide.
Today the picture is bleaker.
– We are entering a new era, says Karim Haggag, director of the Sipri Peace Research Institute.
February 5th the New Start agreement ends. Then there will no longer be any restrictions on how many nuclear weapons the USA and Russia can use.
– This means a world with increasing dangers from nuclear weapons, says Karim Haggag.
The abbreviation Start stands for Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and implies a limit on the number of strategic nuclear weapons.
It’s about rockets that fly back and forth between continents, being fired into space before crashing down on their target.
The technical term is intercontinental ballistic robots. In practice, they are calamitous weapons capable of destroying large cities – ten times more powerful than the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
– Now we are likely to move to a new nuclear arms race, driven primarily by strategic competition between the US and China, says Karim Haggag.
Dmitry Medvedev, who signed the New Start Agreement shows a different face today. In the spring of 2025, he made nuclear threats against Sweden and Finland.
– They are part of a bloc that is hostile to us, he said, according to the Russian news agency Tass.
Russia in particular has developed new nuclear weapons carriers, which has changed the game plan for a possible attack on North America – and Europe.
That’s what Canadian professor Rob Huebert, who heads the Center for the Study of Military, Security and Strategy at the University of Calgary, says.
Huebert points to the Russian hypersonic cruise robots such as Kinzhal and Tsirkon. China is developing similar weapons.
Cruise robots can fly at low altitudes and maneuver along the way. This makes them less predictable than ballistic robots. The fact that they have hypersonic speed means that they fly more than five times faster than the speed of sound.
– They change the game. They can carry nuclear warheads, fly under the radar and reach speeds that rival ICBMs, he says.
Last autumn came The nuclear thriller “A House Made of Dynamite” from director Kathryn Bigelow. In the film, the President of the United States has 18 minutes to make a decision when an unknown missile is spotted on a trajectory from the Pacific toward Chicago.
Should the president order nuclear war or wait to see if the missile is missing a payload?
But the film shows an attack with an intercontinental ballistic robot. In reality, the time can be much shorter than 18 minutes, says Rob Huebert.
– Maybe five minutes or none at all, he says.
He bases this claim on a situation in which a Russian submarine managed to sneak past all warning systems and fire a hypersonic cruise missile loaded with nuclear weapons at a city in North America or Europe.
At the same time have Ukrainian air defenses managed to shoot down Russian hypersonic missiles – so they are not unstoppable. Rob Huebert knows this, but points out that Ukraine is at war. The country’s air defense forces are prepared and know where the threat comes from.
– The missiles are not invisible. But you have to have a radar that looks for them. The planes or submarines with hypersonic robots can maneuver to your weak points where you are not looking or expecting anything, he says.
Karim Haggag from Sipri believes that the termination of the New Start Agreement will have serious consequences for European security.
– Russia’s large arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons and the US’s smaller arsenal will now become an integral part of Europe. They are exactly the type of weapon that poses the greatest threat to NATO member states, he says.
The border between Tactical and strategic nuclear weapons are sometimes blurred, but simply put, the tactical weapons are less powerful and have a shorter range.
Russia has around 1,000 to 2,000 such nuclear weapons. NATO’s counterweight consists of about 100 US tactical bombs stationed in five European countries.
– So there is a big difference between NATO’s tactical nuclear weapons capabilities and those of Russia, says Karim Haggag, who had hoped that a new START treaty could lead to a limit on both strategic and tactical nuclear weapons.
Facts.The New Start Agreement
USA and Russia are the largest nuclear powers in the world. The New START Treaty limited their arsenals – they were only allowed to have 1,550 nuclear warheads of deployed strategic weapons.
The exact number Nuclear weapons in a country are secret, but the Federation of American Scientists produces qualified estimates showing that:
● The US has 3,700 nuclear weapons.
● Russia has 4,300.
● France has 290 and the UK has 225.
● China currently has 600, but the US estimates there could be 1,000 by 2030.
