PUTIN'S NUCLEAR THREAT: WORLD ON EDGE!

A stark communication arrived just weeks after the New START Treaty – the final pillar of nuclear arms control between Russia and the United States – lapsed into expiration. For over a decade, this agreement had served as a fragile guardrail, meticulously limiting both nations to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads, deployed on a maximum of 700 delivery systems.

The treaty’s core wasn’t simply about numbers; it demanded transparency. Regular, on-site inspections allowed each side to verify the other’s compliance, fostering a tense but vital level of trust in an arena where miscalculation could have catastrophic consequences.

Moscow, while acknowledging the treaty’s expiration, publicly stated a commitment to restraint. They declared no intention of initiating escalation or increasing their nuclear arsenal, but only under the critical condition that the United States mirrored this approach.

The unraveling of New START stemmed from a shift in American strategy during the Trump administration. The desire arose for future arms control agreements to encompass China, a nation rapidly modernizing its own nuclear capabilities.

However, this proposal met with firm resistance from Beijing. Chinese officials dismissed the inclusion as unjust and illogical, pointing to the vast disparity in size between their nuclear arsenal and those of Russia and the United States.

China argued that demanding parity in negotiations, given this fundamental imbalance, was fundamentally unreasonable. The rejection effectively stalled any progress towards a broader, multilateral agreement, leaving the future of nuclear arms control in precarious uncertainty.