March 2025
By Kelsey Davenport

U.S. President Donald Trump announced a return to maximum pressure on Iran but reiterated his support for reaching a nuclear deal. The move to ratchet up sanctions sparked a backlash in Tehran, prompting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to caution against negotiations with Washington.

In a Feb. 4 presidential memorandum, Trump said that the United States will deny Iran “all paths to a nuclear weapon” and directed the Treasury Department to “impose maximum economic pressure on the Iranian regime.” The pressure campaign will include “driving Iran’s export of oil to zero,” the memorandum said.

Trump told reporters Feb. 4 that the memorandum is “very tough on Iran” but he was “torn” and “unhappy” about signing it. He expressed a preference for reaching a nuclear deal but did not provide any details about the possible terms of an agreement.

In response to the return to U.S. maximum pressure, Khamenei said Feb. 7 that negotiations with the United States are “not intelligent, wise, or honorable.” There should be “no negotiations with such a government,” he said. The comments appear to signal a shift away from Khamenei’s previous support for talks (see ACT, October 2024).

Khamenei did not expressly forbid President Masoud Pezeshkian’s administration from engaging in talks, suggesting that there may still be space for diplomacy in Iran.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said during a Feb. 8 conference in Tehran that Iran still wants to see sanctions lifted but emphasized that negotiations cannot take place “under the maximum pressure policy.”

After signing the memorandum, Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu said that the United States and Israel share the goal of preventing a nuclear-armed Iran and if maximum pressure can achieve that goal, “so be it.”

Netanyahu’s visit came amid reports that Israel is still considering military strikes against Iran’s nuclear program.

The Washington Post reported Feb. 12 that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency warned that Israel is likely to attempt a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the first six months of 2025. According to the source referenced in the report, the agency assessed that Israeli strikes would set back Iran’s activities only by months and would incentivize Iran to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels. The attack scenarios would require U.S. support for Israeli operations, the intelligence report said.

Trump has refused to commit the United States to supporting an Israeli attack on Iran. Following the Netanyahu meeting, Trump posted on Truth Social that “Reports that the United States, working in conjunction with Israel, is going to blow Iran to smithereens ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED.” Trump said in the Feb. 5 post that he prefers a “Verified Nuclear Peace Agreement.”

Despite Trump’s comments, Netanyahu expressed confidence that with “unflinching support” from the United States “we can and will finish the job” of neutralizing the threat posed by Iran. Netanyahu made the comment during a Feb. 17 press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Meanwhile, Pezeshkian suggested that Iran will rebuild its nuclear programs if Israel attempts a military strike. He said Feb. 13 that Iran’s enemies can “hit the buildings … but you cannot hit those who build it.”

Despite Trump’s stated support for a nuclear deal, it is not clear who in his administration is the point person for talks with Iran.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said Feb. 14 that “we are running out of time” to reach a nuclear deal with Iran. He said talks can be concluded quickly and the IAEA “has all the information and elements” but it is up to the states to determine what is necessary in an agreement.

In addition to the risk of military strikes derailing the prospects for diplomacy, it is likely that the Western European states-parties to the 2015 nuclear deal (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) will begin the process of reimposing 
UN sanctions on Iran by mid-summer if there is no progress on a deal.

The process uses a veto-proof mechanism in UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorsed the 2015 nuclear deal, to reimpose UN sanctions and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. That mechanism, known as “snapback,” expires in October 2025.

The Trump administration, having withdrawn the United States from the nuclear deal during its first term, cannot trigger the snapback (see ACT, September 2020).

Trump’s Feb. 4 memorandum called for the U.S. ambassador to the UN to work with U.S. allies to “complete the snapback of international sanctions and restrictions on Iran.”

Iran has threatened to withdraw from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty if UN sanctions are snapped back.

March 2025
By Xiaodon Liang

U.S. President Donald Trump signaled interest in “denuclearization” with Russia and China, but efforts to end Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and differences over the scope of potential arms control negotiations present challenges to talks.

Responding by video to a reporter’s question about the U.S.-China relationship at the World Economic Forum Jan. 23 at Davos, Trump said “we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible.” He reiterated this position later that day during an interview at the White House with Fox News.

“I want to say: Let’s cut our military budget in half,” Trump told reporters on Feb. 14, on the prospect of a trilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons; we already have so many,” he added, Associated Press reported.

In his remarks to the Davos meeting, Trump said he spoke during his first presidential term with Putin about “denuclearization of our two countries, and China would have come along.” Although the United States attempted to engage Beijing in arms control talks in 2020, U.S. officials were unable to convince China to attend a trilateral summit with Russia or commit to negotiations (see ACT, July/ August 2020).

Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to Trump Jan. 24, saying, “there is something to talk about, we need to talk. Time has been lost in many respects,” according to Reuters. 
The Russia-United States New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) will expire Feb. 5, 2026, leaving the nuclear peers without limits on their deployed strategic forces.

The U.S. Department of State indicated in a Jan. 17 report on Russian compliance with New START that, although Russia “may have exceeded the deployed warhead limit by a small number during portions of 2024,” the “United States assesses with high confidence that Russia did not engage in any large-scale activity above the Treaty limits.”

During the Biden administration, Russia maintained that talks on nuclear arms control would not proceed until the United States dropped its support for Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion. Moscow also suspended its participation in New START in February 2023 to protest Washington’s support for Kyiv (see ACT, March 2023).

Now, Moscow will insist that the nuclear arsenals of France and the United Kingdom be included in the scope of a new round of negotiations, Peskov said.

At a Feb. 10 briefing, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov sounded a note of pessimism. “The U.S. is proposing a three-way talks format, and we want a five-way format. We are going round in circles,” he told Reuters.

Four days later at a press conference in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun reiterated China’s traditional position that Russia and the United States should “further make drastic and substantive cuts to their nuclear arsenals, and create necessary conditions for other nuclear-weapon states to join in the nuclear disarmament process.”

Since the change of U.S. administrations, high-level contact between Russian and U.S. officials has accelerated, focused primarily on resolution of the Ukraine war. Trump and Putin held a 90-minute phone call on Feb. 12 on several bilateral issues, according to a social media post by the U.S. president. The call was preceded by a meeting between Putin and Trump’s special envoy for talks on Ukraine, the Middle East, and hostage negotiations, Steve Witkoff, CNN reported.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other officials in Saudi Arabia Feb. 18. According to a State Department press release, the two sides agreed on steps to normalize relations and hold talks resolving the Ukraine conflict, “in a way that is enduring, sustainable, and acceptable to all sides.”

Growing concern over the prospect of a Russia-United States agreement at the expense of Ukraine prompted an emergency summit of European leaders Feb. 17 in Paris. Speaking in a Feb. 4 online interview to the UK commentator Piers Morgan, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy repeated a previous call for allies to provide nuclear weapons to Ukraine to deter Russia. “Give us back nuclear arms. Give us missile systems,” Zelenskyy said.

March 2025
By Xiaodon Liang

In its first week in office, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump approved an executive order expanding missile defense efforts, signaling a fundamental shift in missile defense policy and calling for the revival of interceptor and sensor development programs.

The Jan. 27 order adopts a new policy of deterring and defending against “any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland,” marking a departure from the long-standing policy across administrations that U.S. missile defense investments should be designed primarily to manage threats from rogue states.

In its 2019 Missile Defense Review, the first Trump administration endorsed the traditional policy, stating that the “United States relies on nuclear deterrence to address the large and more sophisticated Russian and Chinese intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities.”

But other aspects of the 2019 review have been resurrected in the new executive order, such as a call for “Development and deployment of space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept.” In its fiscal year 2020 budget request, the first Trump administration sought to fund studies of particle-beam and kinetic space-based interceptor concepts, although these were later dropped in the following year’s budget.

The new executive order also revives plans for a missile defense “underlayer and terminal-intercept capabilities postured to defeat a countervalue attack.” The concept of an underlayer stationed in the continental United States, adapting the Standard Missile 3 Block IIA interceptor and the Aegis ship-based missile defense system, also was recommended in the 2019 review and included in the fiscal 2021 and 2022 budget requests.

In both of those years, Congress blocked most of the funding for the Missile Defense Agency’s proposal to adapt the Aegis and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems to fulfil the underlayer role (see ACT, January/February 2022).

The new executive order directs the defense secretary to produce within 60 days a “reference architecture” for implementing a plan to defend against “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.”

In addition to steps toward developing space-based and underlayer interceptor capabilities, this document should include plans to accelerate the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor program, according to the order. The Office of Management and Budget is instructed to price out the missile defense expansion so the proposals can be considered for inclusion in the fiscal year 2026 presidential budget request.

Following rapidly upon the executive order, the Missile Defense Agency issued a request for information to defense contractors on Jan. 31 that seeks ideas on how to meet the broad requirements of the Trump administration’s ambitious plans.

On Feb. 5, Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) and Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), introduced a bill to authorize $19.5 billion in fiscal 2026 funding for a broad set of missile defense initiatives beyond the scope of the executive order. Most of the proposed spending, $12 billion, would go toward expanding the ground-based midcourse interceptor field at Fort Greely, Alaska.

March 2025
By Xiaodon Liang

U.S. President Donald Trump has appointed a cabinet of political allies to advise on nuclear policy issues during his second term in office and supplemented them with some subcabinet staff from his first administration.

The Senate unanimously confirmed Trump’s secretary of state, former Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Jan. 20. As a lawmaker, Rubio pushed for a strong U.S. response to Russian violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and urged Trump to rescind the U.S. signature on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in response to allegations of Russian low-yield testing (see ACT, July/August 2019).

Awaiting confirmation is Thomas DiNanno, whom Trump nominated Feb. 11 to be undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. DiNanno previously served as acting assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification, and compliance from 2019 to 2020 while confirmed as a deputy assistant secretary, and before that held several senior positions at the Department of Homeland Security.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a military veteran and former television commentator, had a more difficult path to confirmation, receiving only 50 votes in a split Senate. Senators raised questions about his lack of high-level policy and management experience and personal character.

During questions at a Jan. 14 confirmation hearing, Hegseth claimed that “Russia and China are rushing to modernize and build arsenals larger than ours.” Although U.S. intelligence agencies have not publicly reported a significant expansion of Russian nuclear forces, they have aired concerns that China might build an arsenal of 1,000 to 1,500 nuclear warheads (see ACT, January/February 2025). Those projections remain below the roughly 3,700 warheads in the U.S. stockpile.

Trump’s nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, has divided Republican hawks. Colby’s history of advocating for a military policy that prioritizes China is “a concern to a number of senators,” according to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee in Feb. 13 comments to The Hill.

Colby was deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development from 2017 to 2018, and a principal author of the first Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy. With past experience working on nuclear issues in government and at think tanks, Colby has an extensive track record that senators might scrutinize before his confirmation hearing, which has yet to be scheduled.

In the past, he has argued against military action to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and urged the shepherding of U.S. forces and materiel for a potential war with China. In 2014, he also broached the possibility of first-use of U.S. nuclear weapons against China to ensure against a military defeat, long before this option was discussed more widely in Washington.

Another stakeholder in nuclear debates will be the incoming secretary of the Air Force, Troy Meink, who was appointed principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in October 2020. Among other roles, Meink was a test engineer for the Missile Defense Agency while a commissioned Air Force officer, according to his official NRO biography. In his more recent positions as a Defense Department civilian, his responsibilities centered on acquiring military space assets.

The new secretary of energy, Chris Wright, was confirmed 59-38 by the Senate Feb. 3. In comments to department staff the next day, Wright lauded nuclear weapons as having, “in the big picture, very much a peace-generating impact.”

An oil and gas industry executive, Wright recognized the need to continue environmental remediation work at contaminated Cold War-era nuclear facilities, including the former plutonium production site at Hanford, Washington. “We need to finish cleaning up all of these sites,” he said. Several Hanford clean-up workers were laid off by the Department of Energy later in February.

Trump nominated Brandon Williams, a former New York congressman and former Navy submariner, to be administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. Williams, Meink, and Colby await confirmation.

Mike Waltz, until Jan. 20 a Florida congressman, joined the administration as national security advisor. In three terms in the House of Representatives, he sat on the foreign affairs, armed services, and intelligence committees and gained a reputation for being willing to engage across the aisle on issues despite holding doctrinaire conservative views on foreign policy.

March 2025
By Kelsey Davenport

The Trump administration reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to total North Korean denuclearization, a goal that Pyongyang described as impossible and impractical.

In a Feb. 15 trilateral statement, Japan, South Korea, and the United States expressed “their resolute commitment to the complete denuclearization” of North Korea and sent a “strong warning” that they will “not tolerate any provocations or threats to their homelands.”

The statement was issued after a meeting in Munich with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Japanese Foreign Minister Iwaya Takeshi, and South Korean Foreign Minister Korea Cho Tae-yul.

In a Feb. 18 statement in the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea accused the three states of “inciting collective confrontation and conflict on the Korean peninsula” and said that the goal of denuclearization is “outdated and absurd.”

North Korea’s nuclear weapons are necessary for “defending peace and sovereignty” and a “legitimate tool of self-defence,” the statement said, and the country will “consistently adhere to the new line of bolstering the nuclear force.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had cast some doubt on whether denuclearization would remain a U.S. policy goal for the Trump administration. During his confirmation process, Hegseth referred to North Korea’s “status as a nuclear power” in a Jan. 6 questionnaire for the Senate Armed Services Committee.

His statement prompted a backlash in South Korea, whose foreign ministry issued a statement Jan. 15 saying that North Korea “can never be recognized as a nuclear-armed state.” Denuclearization is “a principle consistently upheld” by the international community, the statement said.

When U.S. President Donald Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore during his first term of office, the two leaders signed a joint declaration that called for the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” (see ACT, July/August 2018).

Since returning to office, Trump has said he is willing to meet with Kim again. At a Feb. 7 press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Trump said his administration “will have relations with North Korea” and noted that he and Kim got along “very well” during their meetings in 2018 and 2019.

But North Korea’s nuclear doctrine has shifted since 2018 and the country has invested in new military capabilities, including more accurate short-range, nuclear-capable missiles and long-range systems capable of targeting the continental United States.

Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, head of the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, raised concerns about the intercontinental ballistic missile that North Korea tested in October 2024 during congressional testimony on Feb. 13. The shortened launch time of the solid-fueled Hwasong-19 missile may impact the effectiveness of U.S. early warning systems, he said. He also noted North Korea’s intentions to increase production of its missile systems and warned that this could “narrow [his] confidence” in the Northern Command’s “existing ballistic missile defense capacity in the coming years.”

Furthermore, recent comments by Kim suggest that North Korea is not interested in resuming dialogue with the United States at this time.

In a Feb. 8 speech marking the 77th anniversary of the founding of the Korean People’s Army, Kim said his country must bolster its military readiness to “proactively respond” to regional security threats. He reiterated plans for an “unlimited defense buildup” and accused the United States of increasing the risk of conflict by deploying nuclear strategic assets in the region.

On the same day, a KCNA commentary said that North Korea’s nuclear weapons are not a “bargaining chip” and condemned U.S.-led efforts to disarm the country of its deterrent.

The deteriorating relationship between North Korea and South Korea could further challenge any U.S. diplomatic efforts. South Korean outreach to North Korea preceded the Trump-Kim summit in 2018.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also is looking to engage North Korea. At a Feb. 20 press conference in Japan, IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi called for the establishment of an agency presence in North Korea.

The IAEA last accessed North Korea’s nuclear facilities in 2009. Grossi said that “there are areas like nuclear safety where we could try to establish some form of engagement” with North Korea.

March 2025
By Libby Flatoff

Hundreds of workers who maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal were fired as part of a purge of federal workers by the Trump administration, which is now rushing to rehire many of them.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Feb. 11 to promptly "initiate large-scale reductions in force," and two days later, some 300 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy, were fired as part of the broader layoffs.

The decision to rehire almost all of those dismissed from their jobs came after sharp criticism from the public, experts, and members of Congress. Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), responding to the cuts on X, wrote, “The Trump Administration fired the U.S. nuclear staff not realizing they oversee the country’s entire weapons stockpile. This isn’t government efficiency. It’s incompetence. They are making America less safe.”

On its website, NNSA describes its mission as “to ensure the United States maintains a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear stockpile,” which its Office of Defense Programs carries out through the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program.

With a $25 billion annual budget, the agency maintains, refurbishes, and secures more than 3,000 nuclear warheads and oversees the production of new nuclear warheads. It employs 2,000 staff and manages more than 55,000 contractors.

According to the Stockpile Stewardship Management Plan, “since many roles within the nuclear security enterprise require specialized training or years of experience to develop proficiency, effectively training personnel, then retaining them, is essential to success.”

Rob Plonski, an NNSA deputy division director, discussed the layoffs in a LinkedIn post Feb. 15. “We cannot expect to project strength, deterrence, and world dominance while simultaneously stripping away the federal workforce …. Years of knowledge and experience are being lost, with no clear strategy to replenish that expertise at the pace required to maintain operational excellence,” he wrote.

Speaking to reporters Feb. 13, Trump suggested scaling back nuclear modernization as a way to reduce government spending. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons. We already have so many, you could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over,” he said.

There are an estimated 12,400 nuclear weapons worldwide, including 5,225 held by the United States.

March 2025
By Kelsey Davenport

The Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction will focus this year on developing cross-cutting strategies to reduce risk and expanding engagement with states outside of the multinational initiative, Canada announced.

The Global Partnership, established in 2002 by the Group of Eight industrialized states, is focused on preventing chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons proliferation. As chair of the 31-member initiative for 2025, Canada is responsible for setting priorities for the initiative’s work.

In a statement on its plans, Canada said the initiative has had a “transformative impact” on weapons of mass destruction [WMD] threat-reduction efforts because of its “unique combination of perseverance and adaptability.”

To ensure that the Global Partnership can address current and future challenges, Canada will focus on developing a strategy for addressing concerns that cut across CBRN threats, “particularly WMD-related disinformation, technologies, and strategic trade controls.”

Canada also will look to engage states and organizations that currently do not participate in the initiative but “have demonstrated a capacity and willingness to contribute meaningfully to WMD threat reduction.”

One of the partnership’s key tools for reducing CBRN risk is a matchmaking process that connects offers of funding and expertise from initiative members to other states or groups working on specific WMD-threat reduction projects.

According to an annex of projects from 2024, 18 Global Partnership states helped implement 424 projects in 159 countries. Italy, the 2024 chair, prioritized a different set of issues, including support for Ukraine and biosecurity efforts (see ACT, March 2024).

The annex documented projects in Ukraine designed to detect and respond to WMD-related threats; strengthen security at nuclear facilities, including rebuilding infrastructure around the Chernobyl complex; and support for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s work in Ukraine. It also noted that partner states supported 153 biosecurity projects, including programs to strengthen biosecurity and biosafety. 

March 2025

The U.S. National Security Administration (NNSA) was ordered by a federal judge to complete a nation-wide programmatic environmental impact statement on expanded plutonium “pit” bomb core production within two-and-a half years after several nonprofit groups challenged the agency's failure to do so. The groups announced the agreement Jan. 16 in a joint statement.

The lawsuit was filed by Savannah River Site Watch of Columbia, SC; Nuclear Watch New Mexico of Santa Fe, NM; Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment (CAREs), based in Livermore, CA; and the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition of coastal Georgia.. It argued that NNSA violated the National Environmental Policy Act by not properly assessing alternatives before proceeding with pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Savannah River Site in South Carolina. In September 2024, U.S. District Court Judge Mary Lewis Geiger ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, leading to a settlement requiring the programmatic environmental statement and public participation (see ACT, November 2024).

According to the groups’ statement, the agreement would effectively halt preparations for plutonium pit production at the Savannah River Site. It would give NNSA two-and-a-half years to complete the environmental statement and hold public hearings before a final decision. Citizens can comment on NNSA’s draft statement and voice health and environmental concerns. In the meantime, NNSA is prohibited from installing classified equipment, introducing nuclear materials, or constructing key facilities at the Savannah River Site, where the agency is planning to produce pits by the mid-2030s. Pit production could continue at the Los Alamos lab. —SHAGHAYEGH CHRIS ROSTAMPOUR

March 2025

The head of the international chemical-weapons watchdog agency visited Damascus in February, marking a major step toward resetting relations with Syria after the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.

Fernando Arias, director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and his team met with the interim president and foreign minister of Syria’s caretaker government in what the OPCW described as “long, productive and very open” discussions on Syria’s chemical weapons program.

Since 2022, the United Nations has bemoaned the lack of progress by the Syrian government in meeting its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Last year’s overthrow of Assad and his government by Syrian rebels is seen as a new opening. (See ACT, January/February 2025.) Arias presented Syrian officials with an action plan drafted by the OPCW Technical Secretariat to help Syria address the remaining issues with its chemical weapons declaration.

After years of denying the program's existence, Syria submitted a declaration of its chemical weapons and facilities to the OPCW in September 2013. In January 2016, the OPCW announced that Syria’s entire declared stockpile of 1,308 metric tons of chemical agent and precursor chemicals had been destroyed. The OPCW determined, however, that the Syrian government continued to use chemical weapons even after the bulk of the declared stockpile had been eliminated.

“Today’s visit to #Syria marks a reset,” Arias said in a Feb. 8 post on X. “After 11 years of obstruction by the previous authorities, the Syrian caretaker authorities have a chance to turn the page and meet Syria’s obligations under the Convention.”—MINA ROZEI

March 2025
By Daryl G. Kimball

It has been barely a month since Inauguration Day, but U.S. President Donald Trump is already moving to reshape longstanding foreign policy, radically alter relationships with the nation’s closest allies, and upend its role as a bulwark against an expansionist, authoritarian Russia.

Not only has Trump, ignoring all facts, blamed Ukraine for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion; he appears to be seeking an end to the war on Putin’s terms: ceding Ukrainian territory seized by Russia, denying Kyiv a path to NATO membership, and leaving Ukraine with flimsy security guarantees. Trump’s posture already has undermined the credibility of U.S. security commitments to its NATO allies and could lead to further instability in Europe.

At the same time, a dialogue between Moscow and Washington could lead to negotiations to maintain or lower current limits on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals before the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expires in February 2026.

In January, Trump expressed support for nuclear talks with China and Russia in terms not uttered by a Republican politician in recent memory. In response to a question about China-U.S. relations, he said: “Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about .... So, we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible.” The Kremlin replied that it wants to resume the nuclear dialogue “as soon as possible.”

To translate Trump’s denuclearization comments into concrete results, his team will need to craft a more practical and effective approach than the one Trump pursued in his first term. In 2020, Trump tried and failed to launch three-way talks involving China, Russia, and the United States. He then refused to agree to a simple extension of New START, leaving it to Putin and President Joe Biden to do so during Biden’s first days in office in 2021.

Negotiating on nuclear arms control with Russia is always difficult. Achieving a new comprehensive framework could require sustained talks over many months, if not longer. The two sides have sparred for years about further cuts to their strategic stockpiles, the now-defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, substrategic nuclear weapons, and missile defenses, which Russia believes could negate much of its offensive retaliatory force.

The smartest approach would be for Putin and Trump to strike a simple, informal deal to maintain the existing caps set by New START (1,550 deployed warheads on no more than 700 strategic delivery systems) after the treaty expires, as long as the other side agrees to do so. They could agree to resume data exchanges and inspections, or simply monitor compliance through national technical means of intelligence.

Such a deal would reduce tensions, forestall a costly arms race that no one can win, and buy time for talks on a broader, more durable, framework deal. An interim arrangement to cap or cut their strategic nuclear arsenals would provide new diplomatic leverage to curb the buildup of China’s arsenal, now about 600 nuclear warheads, some 400 of which can be delivered on long-range missiles.

In the absence of such new limits, Russia and the United States could significantly increase the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads by uploading additional warheads onto existing land- and sea-based ballistic missiles. Any Russian and U.S. buildup would destabilize the mutual balance of nuclear terror, strain the already exorbitant and behind-schedule U.S. nuclear modernization program, and prompt China to accelerate its own nuclear buildup.

Although Trump has decried the enormous costs of nuclear weapons—now projected to consume more than $800 billion in the next decade—he also has directed the U.S. Defense Department to make a priority of upgrading the nuclear arsenal and expanding missile defenses, ostensibly to defend against a Chinese or Russian strategic nuclear attack.

This approach would only stiffen resistance in Beijing and Moscow to limits on their own offensive nuclear forces and encourage them to adapt their nuclear forces to overwhelm new U.S. missile defenses. A new U.S. nuclear buildup would not achieve “peace through strength.” It would be madness.

Halting the cycle of spiraling nuclear tensions is in every nation’s interest and is every nation’s obligation. Under Article VI of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Russia and the United States, as well as China, France, and the United Kingdom, are legally obligated to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”

Even if Trump appeases Russia on Ukraine, it is still in the U.S. and international security interest, as well as Trump’s own interest, to curb nuclear excess and reduce the nuclear danger. If Trump can pull off an agreement to cap or reduce U.S. and Russian arsenals, that would be a significant and surprising step forward in a time of global turmoil.