US President Donald Trump said Sunday he was OK with keeping up a nuclear arms treaty between Washington and Moscow, at a time when the Kremlin warned that US-Russian relations risked deterioration if the White House approved Tomahawk missile sales to Kyiv, as had been suggested.
Vice President JD Vance said last week that Washington is considering Ukraine’s request for Tomahawks, which could reach far into Russia, including Moscow. The US also plans to give Ukraine intelligence on Russian energy targets, Reuters reported last week.
Even though the US administration has quietly backed off of those remarks, explaining that most of those long-range, precision missiles are already reserved for the US Navy and other military missions, Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin has insisted that such a position would require a reset in Washington-Moscow relations.
Putin expressed over the weekend that if US supplied Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine for long-range strikes deep into Russia, “This will lead to the destruction of our relations, or at least the positive trends that have emerged in these relations,” he was heard saying in a video clip released on Sunday.
Russian state media TASS reported on Sunday that Moscow “could revoke its ratification of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, given that the US hasn’t ratified it,” transmitting Putin’s remarks at a meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club over the weekend:
“As a rule, specialists say that with a new weapon, you have to make sure that the special warhead will work without failure, but you don’t have to conduct tests. I am not ready to say now whether we need to conduct tests or not, but it is possible, in principle, to do the same in relations with the United States as it did when it signed but did not ratify [the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty]. We, however, both signed and ratified it.
“But it’s up to lawmakers at the State Duma [Russia’s legislature]. Theoretically, it is possible to revoke the ratification, and if we do so, it will be quite enough.”
Putin must have forgotten that he had already officially withdrawn Russia from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in November 2023, after making the same threat this weekend that he had made in October 2023.
When asked by a reporter at the White House on Sunday about Putin’s offer to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), four months before its February 5, 2026, expiration, Trump replied, “Sounds like a good idea to me.”
The first limited nuclear treaty, the Partial-Test-Ban Treaty (PTBT), was signed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and British Foreign Secretary Lord Home. The US Senate approved the PTBT on September 23, 1963, by an 80-19 margin. President John F. Kennedy signed the ratified treaty on October 7, 1963.
In 1996, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Signed at the time by 71 nations (currently with 181 states signed, with 148 ratifying the treaty), including those possessing nuclear weapons, the treaty prohibited all nuclear test explosions, including those conducted underground.
Although President Bill Clinton was the first leader to sign the CTBT, discussions dragged on for years in the US Capitol. In 1999, the Republican-controlled Senate rejected the treaty by a vote of 51 to 48.
Russia signed the CTBT at the UN General Assembly in 1996 and ratified it on June 30, 2000. But, in October of 2023, Putin threatened to withdraw from the treaty on nuclear weapons testing, as he did this weekend. On Nov. 2, 2023, Putin followed through with his threat and signed a law officially withdrawing from the CTBT.
On the other hand, the New START, signed by both sides, restricts both countries’ deployed short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs), so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons, and requires that intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and overall nuclear warhead numbers remain below the agreed-upon limits.
New START, signed and ratified by both Moscow and Washington in 2010, in force since February 2011, limits each side to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads, and 800 deployed and non-deployed ballistic missile launchers and heavy bombers. New START was supposed to be in effect after a 2021 mutually agreed-upon five-year extension until February 2026.
This replaced START I, signed in 1991, ratified in both nations, and in effect from 1994, which expired in December 2009.
START II, although signed in 1993 and ratified by both the US (in 1996) and Russia (in 2000), never went into effect. It was conditioned on preserving the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, whereby each side would not defend itself using air defenses such as the Patriot. When the US withdrew from the ABM treaty in 2002, Russia withdrew one day later from START II.
In February 2023, however, Russia suspended its participation in New START. It technically did not withdraw from the treaty, and clarified that it would continue to abide by the numerical limits in the treaty. But it suspended its participation in inspections that would ensure compliance.