The Race That Can’t Be Won

Like Toto in The Wizard of Oz, at their 1985 summit in Geneva President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pulled back the curtain to reveal the truth behind the terrifying specter of nuclear war, which their countries were spending hundreds of billions of dollars to prepare for. “A nuclear war cannot be won,” they jointly stated, and “must never be fought.” They omitted the inescapable corollary of those first six words: a nuclear arms race also cannot be won.

Still, the statement, almost unique among government declarations for its blunt truthfulness, strengthened the case for the arms control and nonproliferation undertakings that followed. Decades of agonizingly difficult negotiations built up a dense structure of treaties, agreements, and even a few unilateral moves dealing with offensive and defensive nuclear weapons of short, medium, and long range, with provisions for testing, inspections, and an overflight regime for mutual observation. Often the two sides would only give up systems they no longer wanted. Frequently the language of the agreements was the basis of future friction. On the US side, the political price of securing Senate ratification of treaties could be extremely high.

But for all its shortcomings, arms control brought down the total number of nuclear weapons held by the two countries from 60,000 to roughly 11,000 today. (The exact number is classified.) Under the most recent treaty, New START, signed in 2010, each side is limited to 1,550 deployed weapons, with the rest in storage. By any accounting, that 80 percent drop (95 percent counting just deployed weapons) is—or was—a notable achievement.

Unfortunately, the past tense is correct, because since the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002—thereby legitimizing the unilateral renunciation of an agreement by one party if it no longer finds the restrictions to its taste—the other agreements have fallen one by one. In February 2026—about five hundred days from now—New START, the last remaining brick in the edifice so painstakingly built, will expire, leaving