On Jan. 23, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to annihilation. Two weeks later, on Feb. 5, the New START treaty expired. Its expiration removed the last legally binding constraint on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals and the last institutional mechanism preventing fear from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This issue isn’t about warhead counts — at least not directly. Ukraine is draining Russian resources, America’s appetite for Cold-War-esque spending is highly complicated and controversial, and while China does not wish for strategic parity with Washington or Moscow, its rapid silo expansion and arsenal modernization create the exact kind of uncertainty that makes bilateral agreements untenable for the United States. Thus, reducing this critical moment to an inventory stock misses the real threat.
The true weapon of mass destruction unleashed by New START’s collapse is uncertainty. And history suggests that uncertainty can be more destabilizing than any nuclear arsenal.
New START is the latest heir to a long lineage of arms control agreements — from SALT to START I to the Treaty of Moscow — each one born from the shared recognition that the vicious cycle of escalation could not sustain itself. Fear channeled into forced cooperation was always the architect.
The 2010 treaty capped deployed strategic warheads at 1,550 and instituted one of the most rigorous verification structures ever schemed, upheld by on-site checks, biannual reports, and satellite monitoring. These mechanisms mattered because they reduced suspense. Once one knows exactly what is in their enemy’s arsenal, the worst-case-scenario calculus that causes massive escalation and re-escalation is unnecessary and impossible to explain to generals, leaders, and the public.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine shattered the protocols of this treaty as Moscow halted inspections in 2023. Washington responded by stopping data sharing. By the time the treaty formally expired in February, all that remained was a skeleton as the mutual transparency was replaced with mutual distrust and suspicion.
Political scientists call this the security dilemma: one country increases its security, neighbors respond in kind, and everyone ends up less secure despite acting in self-defense. New START served as an institutional brake on this dilemma. Without it, Washington and Moscow begin their unsustainable worst-case calculus — and that calculus has its own momentum.
The worst case is not a morning when Putin decides to launch, but the slow, structural collapse of trust that makes any actor’s restraint feel like a liability. The danger is not that either side wants war; it’s that neither side can believe the other won’t start one. That distinction matters because it moves the threat out of the realm of individual intention and into the realm of inevitability, which is exactly where it becomes hardest to stop.
The Anglo-German naval race to the dreadnought before World War I is the example that fits best, because it shows how catastrophe can emerge from mutual suspicion. Neither London nor Berlin wanted a global conflict that ended in the reordering of the world. But in the absence of transparency, intentions vanish. All that remains clear are capabilities. And capabilities always seem threatening.
However, the most underexamined part of this crisis is not military at all. It is what fear does to the character of democratic politics, and therefore to the kind of leaders democracies produce when they need strong, reasoned diplomacy.
Charismatic authority is a form of political legitimacy that arises when institutions fail in the moment. Or, more accurately, when traditional frameworks are not enough to support the needs of the nation. As a result, the public looks for someone who can navigate a crisis through force of will rather than process and personality rather than legal acumen. But this also means that when the threat is mitigated, so is the force that this figure can command.
Takaichi won the largest landslide in postwar Japanese history not despite the threatening environment but because of it. The AfD, Reform, Meloni, and Trump; these movements did not manufacture fear from nothing. They read fear that was already there, amplified it, and converted it into political capital. The leaders currently governing most of the world’s major democracies have an incentive, not necessarily conspiratorial, to allow the post-New START environment to maintain its air of suspicion and fear.
The biggest issue with this phenomenon is that there is no single actor that we can point to. Since every action and reaction is defensive, they can be considered reasonable to each respective camp. So, there is no accountability and no single decision to reverse.
What can be done in this situation is actually a narrower question than most people want to admit. A formal successor treaty is not a realistic goal in our current environment. Washington insists on trilateral arms control that includes China, driven by Beijing’s rapid nuclear modernization and the impossibility of capping American arsenals while Beijing’s remains unconstrained. But China has no incentive to accept constraints on the one area where it is finally closing the gap. All we have now are low-threshold prevention methods like pre-notification agreements for missile tests, crisis communication protocols, and informal data-sharing. None of this is sufficient, yet all of it is better than nothing. The Cuban Missile Crisis was not resolved by a treaty. It was resolved by a phone line and thirteen days of people choosing, at every decision point, not to be the one who made it worse. The phone line mattered.
The Cold War ended because both sides eventually realized that the everlasting, permanent existential dread was unsustainable. That conclusion took forty years and came close to not arriving in time.
The Doomsday Clock now stands at 85 seconds to midnight — the closest it has ever been. Feb. 5, 2026, forces us to ask if we can move the clock backward without needing another forty years of suspicion to get there, or if the leaders our fear has chosen for us will let it keep ticking forward.
Featured Image Source: CNN