It’s 2026, and in his D.C. office at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Dr. Aris Thorne feels a familiar dread. The news alert, “Nation X Withdraws from Treaty Y”, wasn’t a surprise, but it still lands like a punch. Another piece of the arms control framework is gone, accelerating us toward a new age of nuclear proliferation and shaky international security. If this continues, the world will have no guardrails left against a major-power war.
Key Takeaways
- Key treaties like the INF and Open Skies have fallen apart, and that collapse is speeding up, taking with it the rules that once prevented military escalation.
- Rising tensions between the U.S., Russia, and China are the direct cause for this breakdown, as distrust poisons negotiations and raises the odds of a disastrous miscalculation.
- Without verifiable agreements, we’re flying blind. It’s much harder to track what other countries are building, which makes it nearly impossible to predict their intentions.
- New weapons like hypersonic missiles and military AI are outpacing old treaties, and we’ll need completely new verification and diplomatic strategies to manage them.
- The only way to pull back from the brink is a serious, renewed push for diplomacy and new, more flexible arms control frameworks that can actually handle today’s global risks.
Dr. Thorne remembers when the architecture of arms control, flawed as it was, gave us some predictability. The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, for instance, got rid of an entire category of nuclear-capable missiles. The START framework, right up through New START, put hard caps on the number of deployed strategic warheads and bombs. These agreements were the machinery for managing superpower competition and heading off an accidental war because they forced transparency, built a little trust (which is always in short supply), and in the end lowered the existential threat of nuclear winter. I spent decades of my own career on the verification protocols that made them work, protocols that feel like ancient history now.
This didn’t all fall apart at once. The unraveling was a slow burn with flashes of real tension. Take the United States pulling out of the INF Treaty in 2019. The official line was that Russia wasn’t complying, pointing to their development and deployment of the 9M729 missile. Moscow, of course, just denied it and shot back that the U.S. was building its own questionable systems. Whether you believe one side or the other, the finger-pointing showed how far trust had completely broken down. The problem wasn’t just about one missile. It was that the major powers had stopped having real strategic dialogue and were operating on pure suspicion.
After the INF Treaty died, the Treaty on Open Skies went the same way. The U.S. left in 2020, again blaming Russian non-compliance. That treaty was important because it let countries fly unarmed surveillance planes over each other’s territory, giving everyone a firsthand look at military movements. Losing that means losing a real, tangible source of reassurance. When you can’t see for yourself that a military exercise is just an exercise, you start assuming the worst, and that’s how you get a miscalculation that spirals out of control.
The world of 2026 is just a different place than it was a decade ago. The US-China rivalry has gone into overdrive, and that includes a massive military buildup. Since China was never a party to most of the Cold War arms treaties, it’s been free to expand its nuclear arsenal and develop things like hypersonic weapons without constraint. Back in 2023, a U.S. Department of Defense report put China’s operational nuclear warhead count at over 400, with projections it could hit 1,000 by 2030. That kind of expansion, combined with total secrecy, forces every other nuclear power to rethink its own posture and starts a three-way arms race.
Meanwhile, Russia, bogged down in Ukraine and under heavy sanctions, is talking more aggressively about its nuclear doctrine. Moscow’s hints about using tactical nuclear weapons have sent a chill through the international community. Then it suspended its participation in New START in early 2023. While not a full withdrawal, it gutted the last bilateral nuclear treaty with the U.S. As analysts at the Arms Control Association pointed out, this move killed on-site inspections and made it impossible to have a verified count of Russia’s strategic arsenal, injecting huge uncertainty when we needed it least.
When you don’t have agreed-upon limits and a way to check them, countries are forced to guess what their rivals are up to. That guesswork always defaults to worst-case scenarios, which in turn justifies building more and better weapons to counter a threat that might be exaggerated. It’s the classic “security dilemma”: one country’s move to feel more secure, like building a new missile defense system, makes its neighbor feel less secure, prompting them to build more offensive missiles to defeat it. We’ve seen this feedback loop before in the Cold War, and it doesn’t end well.
New military technologies are throwing gasoline on the fire. Hypersonic missiles, which can maneuver at over Mach 5, make a mockery of most current missile defense systems, shrinking reaction times from minutes to seconds. Then you have artificial intelligence (AI) in warfare, especially autonomous weapons. How do you even begin to write a treaty limiting an AI algorithm? If an autonomous drone makes a mistake and hits a civilian target, who is legally responsible, the programmer, the commander who deployed it, the machine itself? These aren’t just academic questions anymore. They are urgent problems that our current policy and technical frameworks have no answer for.
Cyber warfare adds a whole other layer of risk. An attack that spoofs an early-warning satellite system or takes down a nuclear command-and-control network could easily be misinterpreted as the opening salvo of a nuclear strike, forcing a catastrophic launch in response. There are no established rules of engagement for cyberspace, leaving this massive gray area where a hacker in one country could accidentally trigger a war between two others. We’re working with brand new military technologies without a manual or any shared understanding of the rules.
Still, some people are trying to put the pieces back together. Quiet discussions are happening at the United Nations Disarmament Commission, and sometimes you see smaller, regional initiatives pop up. The appetite for stability hasn’t completely vanished. The problem is that these efforts get bogged down by national interests and the deep-seated mistrust between the major powers, where one country’s veto can sideline years of work.
I agree with Dr. Thorne: we have to change how we think about this. We can’t just mourn the old treaties. We have to build something new. The next generation of arms control has to be more flexible, maybe with shorter-term agreements that can be updated as technology changes, and it absolutely has to include China. It also has to tackle these new technologies head-on, with specific working groups for AI and cyber warfare. The goal is to manage the military application of new tech, not to stop progress itself.
The challenges are obvious. Rebuilding the kind of trust needed for a verifiable treaty takes years of consistent, painstaking work. And how do you verify that a country isn’t using a prohibited AI algorithm in its drones? It’s incredibly difficult. But the alternative, a world with no arms control, is a free-for-all military competition where the odds of a global catastrophe get higher every single day. The stakes for global stability, and our own survival, are just too high to do nothing.
What does “arms control” actually mean?
Think of it as the international rulebook for weapons, especially the really dangerous ones like nukes. It’s all about treaties and informal agreements that put limits on the development, production, numbers, and use of certain types of military hardware. At its heart, it’s a tool to keep the world from spiraling into constant arms races and to reduce the chance of a war, particularly a nuclear one.
Why are all these arms control treaties falling apart?
It’s not one single thing. You’ve got intense competition between the US, Russia, and China souring the mood for any cooperation. Then there are the constant accusations that countries are cheating on the agreements they did sign. On top of that, new military technologies are emerging that the old treaties never anticipated, and the foundation of trust needed to build new ones has basically crumbled.
What’s the worst that could happen if arms control completely disappears?
The risks are huge. You’d likely see more countries trying to get nuclear weapons. The major powers would almost certainly get locked into a new arms race, building up both their nuclear and conventional forces. With less transparency, the chance of a misunderstanding, thinking a defensive move is an attack, for example, goes way up, making an accidental war far more likely. The whole world just becomes a much more dangerous place.
How do things like hypersonic missiles and AI mess up arms control?
These new technologies create problems that old-school treaties can’t handle. For example, how do you verify a ban on a specific type of software in an autonomous drone? You can’t just count them like you can a missile silo. Hypersonic missiles are so fast and maneuverable they upend decades of defensive strategy and shrink decision-making time to almost zero, while AI-powered weapons introduce thorny ethical questions about accountability that we have no answers for yet.
So what can be done to fix this mess?
There’s no magic bullet, but the first step is getting the major powers talking again, even if it’s just to avoid accidents. We need to start designing new, more adaptable agreements that can actually account for emerging tech. That means bringing China to the table, which won’t be easy. In the end, it comes down to a serious, sustained diplomatic effort to rebuild some basic level of trust through small, verifiable steps.
“The US strike is the first known attack on Iran since President Donald Trump paused a renewed military campaign in late July.”
