The New START nuclear arms treaty between the US and Russia, originally signed in April 2010, expired last month, leaving the two countries with no agreement in place on the size and composition of their nuclear arsenals.

Trump offered a variety of responses to the end of New START, from promising to create an “improved and modernized” version to teasing plans to resume nuclear testing. Behind Trump’s bluster lies another unwelcome intrusion of reality for US imperialism, which is forced to contend with its relative decline on the international stage. This shift is opening a “new nuclear era” for the fractured world’s leaders to navigate.

Fear over where the situation is headed is understandable. News coverage has highlighted the possibility of capitalist powers detonating nukes via underwater drones and putting nuclear weapons in outer space. These weapons have a destructive potential that could reduce humanity to barbarism. And they are controlled by people capable of blatant atrocities, from the genocide in Gaza to the horrors laid bare in the Epstein files.

The terrifying power of nuclear weapons still makes their use unlikely. The capitalists would not benefit from a planet too devastated to turn a profit. But that fact does not completely answer the question of what will emerge post-New START. The first step to understanding what lies ahead is to understand how we got here.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The Manhattan Project to develop the world’s first nuclear weapon cost roughly $40 billion in today’s money at a time when Americans had to ration food. The bomb’s first victims were New Mexicans living dangerously close to the site of the Trinity test, who had no idea it was taking place. For the government, secrecy surrounding the project was worth the price of ordinary people’s lives.

The US then dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. This atrocity had nothing to do with defeating the Japanese emperor and his military, who were already preparing to sue for peace. With the war over in Europe and winding down in the Pacific, it was clear to the American establishment that the main adversary in their crusade to defend their business interests across the globe was the Soviet workers’ state.

The Soviets had been bolstered by their victory over Hitler and were preparing to shift the Red Army eastward to crush Japanese forces in Manchuria. The US ruling class was desperate to limit Soviet influence in East Asia.

Once the power of this new weapon had been demonstrated through the murder of some 200,000 Japanese civilians, the atom bomb also proved useful for securing American interests in Western Europe. The US was able to provide military cover for the battered capitalist regimes there, even though the Soviets outnumbered them in conventional forces. In this way, nuclear weapons played an important role in shaping the postwar order.

Cold War

By the 1960s, the Soviet Union had built its own nuclear arsenal to rival America’s. The race to amass the largest nuclear stockpile was becoming enormously expensive. Meanwhile, the American government was confronted first with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and later the quagmire in Vietnam.

If the American ruling class wished to maintain its position at the top of the world order, it needed an agreement with the Soviets to prevent spiraling costs and more unpopular wars.

The two blocs established agreements banning certain types of testing, regulating the composition of their arsenals, and establishing channels of communication to prevent an accidental nuclear holocaust. This was the basis for the period of détente in the 1970s, but it could not last.

Economic interests, which were precisely what had pushed the US to the negotiating table, also threatened the stability of its new relationship with the Soviet Union. In the final analysis, there could be no lasting compromise between the irreconcilably opposed social systems of capitalist America and the Soviet workers’ state.

Inevitably, cracks began to appear in US-Soviet relations. By the early 1980s, conflicts in Afghanistan, Central America, and elsewhere in the so-called “Third World” strained diplomatic relations between the two powers.
This “New Cold War” shattered illusions that the agreements on nuclear weapons could lead to a more peaceful world. The demise of New START is merely the final nail in similar illusions of global stability under capitalism.

A new nuclear era

The world situation is unstable, but not because Trump has failed to re-ratify a nuclear arms treaty with Russia. It is because the entire capitalist system is in deep crisis, which is pushing the US into sharper competition with its main rivals, China and Russia.

In the immediate postwar period, American imperialism was the capitalist world’s strongest power by far. This economic power, combined with its head start in developing and stockpiling nuclear weapons, put it in the catbird seat at the negotiating table.

Today, things are different. The war in Ukraine demonstrates the decline in the US’ military strength relative to Russia’s. China’s nuclear stockpile is now also a concern for the US imperialists, but China has little incentive to agree to any rules until its arsenal catches up to America’s.

The capitalists cannot eliminate the threat posed by nuclear weapons. The only way to achieve this aim is to rid the world of their destructive system once and for all.