The balance of nuclear forces and the containment of weapons development have given rise to several agreements between the United States and Russia in recent decades, the most recent of which is known as New START, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has left in place. suspense with a symbolic address to the nation.

The first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) dates back more than three decades. The decomposition of the Soviet Union reconfigured relations between Washington and Moscow and, after the pulse of the Cold War, it was time for certain gestures, also in terms of weapons.

The initial text signed in 1991 has given rise to successive attempts and renewals that reached their peak in 2010, when Barack Obama, then president of the United States, and Dimitri Medveded, at the helm of Russia at the time, signed the third version of the START.

It entered into force the following year and sets a more ambitious limit than previous agreements. It limits to 1,550 the nuclear warheads that the two countries can have deployed and, despite the fact that the two sides have exchanged criticism in recent years, they had technically agreed to extend these commitments until February 2026.

The treaty contemplates guarantees in terms of inspections and transparency, to the extent that each of the two signatory powers needs to be clear that the other is fulfilling its part. The US Department of State collects data from September 2022 on its website that supports said compliance: with 1,420 warheads by the United States and 1,549 in the case of Russia.

However, in January of this year, the Joe Biden Administration accused Moscow of breaching the agreed terms, by vetoing the presence of inspectors in their territories after the theoretical return to normality after a phase of paralysis due to the COVID-19 pandemic. and already with the military offensive in Ukraine in full swing.

A hypothetical rupture of the New START would imply that the arsenals of the two largest nuclear powers in the world would not have any limitations for the first time since the 1970s, in the midst of the Cold War. Putin, for now, has limited himself to “suspending the participation” of Russia, claiming that for now it is not an “abandonment”.

The Russian president has used the nuclear threat on several occasions since he gave the order to start the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2021. This Tuesday, he pointed out that Russia “must be prepared to carry out nuclear tests if the United States carries them out first”.