The New START treaty expired last night. It is the last of the Cold War-era missile agreements and marks the death of what security infrastructure was left to prevent the total annihilation of the planet.

There was a reason this infrastructure was put in place. Without it the natural urge is to get into an arms race. The logic of the security infrastructure is that of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) – i.e. you only need enough missiles to make sure that the other guy will also be completely destroyed if he fires at you first.

Without the infrastructure the temptation is to get a bigger and better missile than the other guy (or just more of them) so that you have an advantage. As both the US and Russia already have over 5,000 missiles each that is already complete overkill in the MAD set up. (China is a relatively new player in this game and has around 600.) You only need 100 missiles to get through the defence to completely collapse a society. And as air defences are not airtight, the military boffins estimate current defences can only stop between 50-70% of inbound missiles. So, we can already blow the world up at least 15-times over.

In other words, slashing the stockpiles will make no practical difference to your ability to destroy the other guy – hence the alphabet soup of missile deals. Why waste all that money and resources on building and maintaining extra missiles if they make no difference to the end result at all? This was the Cold War logic and clearly a very sensible one.

One of the conditions to the New START was to limit stockpiles of missiles to 1,500. If you assume that only 30% of your missiles get through, then that is still 450 missiles – four-times more than you need for MAD to work.

But all this infrastructure has been dismantled now and actually a new arms race is not just a potential problem. A new arms race is already well underway.

This all goes back to 2002 when former President George W Bush unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty), the granddaddy of missile deals that was signed in 1972 between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, starting the whole security thing off.

This was an insane and totally unnecessary decision, and the Kremlin freaked out. (I know some people that were involved in the discussion at the time.) This was only a year after Bush met Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and “saw his soul” in his eyes.

Withdrawing from the ABM fundamentally and irreversibly destabilised the international balance of power. It sets off a series of events that leads, in my opinion, directly to the war in Ukraine. It’s one of the reasons that Putin is so obsessed with Nato expansion. After the ABM, one by one all the remaining deals were cancelled or allowed to expire. New START is the last one.

Given the writing has been on the wall for more than two decades, it is no wonder that Russia (and now increasingly China) has been investing heavily into weapons tech.

Those biblical words are doubly poignant today. They appeared on the wall of King Belshazzar’s feast: “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” which means: “God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end. You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting. Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.” Belshazzar was killed the same night.

And having kicked the race off by withdrawing from the ABM, surprisingly the US has been napping ever since. Russian and Chinese missile technology has come on by leaps and bounds since then. Putin showcased new Russian hypersonic missiles during his 2018 state of the nation speech including an ominous video of them flying over the US. More recently Russia released the Oreshnik cruise missile that can hit any city in Europe. The Kinzhal and Zircon, both of which have been used in Ukraine, are too fast to stop (although there are reports of some Kinzhals being brought down by air defence but not the Zircon). The “unstoppable” nuclear powered Poseidon torpedo can circumnavigate the world undetected as it travels so deep. The US doesn’t have anything like this in its arsenal.

It’s the same in critical minerals: there is a very famous Department of Energy report published in 2010 warning that the US had fallen way behind China in the production of critical minerals and rare earth metals (REMs) that China had already, even then, and absolutely nothing was done to address the problem. Ironically, it is one of the (few) things that Trump is doing right, his minerals diplomacy.

The Chinese and Russian are in a race to increase the speeds of their missiles which are already up to a reported Mach 27 (Avangard) in Russia’s case and Mach 25 (DF-41) in China’s case. This is so fast that these missiles can fly from a home base and penetrate the US air defences in under 30mins.

Amazingly, the US doesn’t have any hypersonic missiles at all. It has the “Dark Eagle”, but that is still in development testing and also only has a top speed of Mach 5+. Europe’s hypersonic missiles are still theoretical blueprints.

As our military analyst Patricia Marins recently pointed out the same is true with bells on with the US navy and in naval missiles and Europe is essentially defenceless against a Russian missile attack. Russia has already remilitarised and its entire economy is now on a war footing. China is doing the same thing, and it is knocking out new state of the art high tech weapons every year. China and Russia are developing next-generation combat aircraft. China’s reported J-36 programme appears more advanced than Russia’s Su-57, while the US remains the global leader through its NGAD programme and the troubled F-35 for the moment.

The irony is that despite the US starting this pointless arms race, the Kremlin has made it crystal clear time and time again that it doesn’t want to go there and Putin is desperately keen to restart all these Cold War agreements. He leapt on Biden when the former president offered to renew START in 2021 and the Kremlin immediately offered to open talks on putting the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INS Treaty), which Trump nixed in 2019, back in place. Ironically, Biden was also a strong advocate of renewing the Cold War deals and vehemently criticised the decision to nix the ABM treaty, which he warned would be “deeply destabilising” to the international order.

Putin’s desire to renew the missile security infrastructure represents real leverage over the Kremlin in the current peace talks as he would be willing to give up a lot to get these deals done, in my opinion. But the issue has barely been mentioned. In the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement this morning they threatened a new arms race, but even now at this late stage, held the door open for new arms control talks. However, the MFA also said that they had no response from the White House on their offer to negotiate and that “no message is a message in itself.”

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