Nuclear deterrence is dying. And hardly anyone notices
By Alex Kolbin | January 30, 2026
President Donald Trump speaks to the media before boarding Marine One on January 9, 2026. The day before, the President told New York Times reporters, “If it expires, it expires,” referring to New START—the last remaining bilateral nuclear arms control treaty between Washington and Moscow, which expires on February 5. (Photo: White House/Molly Riley)Share
For decades, nuclear weapons have been treated as the ultimate arbiter of international politics. They were supposed to deter great-power war, impose caution on leaders, and anchor what strategists liked to call strategic stability. Today, that framework is eroding in plain sight. Yet the reaction from policymakers and much of the expert community remains oddly muted.
Put simply, nuclear weapons are no longer functioning as a decisive factor in global security.
For almost four years, Russia—the world’s largest nuclear power—has been subjected to missile strikes carried out with systems supplied by several other nuclear-armed states. The United Kingdom now openly speaks of developing new tactical ballistic missiles for Kyiv and of placing “leading-edge weapons” directly into the hands of Ukrainians. Russia itself employs nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic Oreshnik missiles as if they were any other conventional weapon system for punishing Ukrainian infrastructure. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump casually commented on New START—the last remaining bilateral nuclear arms control treaty between Washington and Moscow, which expires on February 5—“If it expires, it expires.” And former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, currently serving as a Deputy Chief of the Russian Security Council, stated, “No START-4 is better than a treaty that only masks mutual distrust and provokes an arms race in other countries,” referring to what may come next after New START expires.
This is not how deterrence was supposed to work.
Shock technology. The traditional logic was straightforward. Nuclear weapons were so destructive that their mere existence would impose discipline and responsibility on those who possess them. Escalation would be tightly managed as a result, red lines respected, and arms control treated as a shared survival mechanism rather than a conditional concession. That logic has not vanished overnight—but it is slowly and decisively losing its force. And I’ve been able to experience this shift firsthand.
In 2010, I was involved in promoting New START in Russia as part of the Russian Center for Policy Research (PIR Center)—a Moscow-based nonprofit organization then carrying out research and policy work in arms control and WMD nonproliferation in collaboration with researchers from other nuclear-weapon states. At the time, nuclear arms control was still widely understood on both sides as the backbone of strategic stability. Even amid deep mistrust, there was a shared principle that the nuclear domain had to remain insulated from day-to-day geopolitical confrontation.
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That era now looks decisively over.
Historically, nuclear weapons were a shock technology that emerged from the horrific atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They rebuilt international relations not just because of their destructive power, but because they fundamentally changed the risk calculus for those on both sides of these new weapons. However, no disruptive technology retains its dominance forever. Over time, adversaries adapt, political taboos erode, and most importantly, new tools emerge that change the balance again.
All available evidence suggests that we are living through such a transition now with nuclear weapons.
Displaced. One likely successor to nuclear weapons’ sole dominance on the strategic value ladder could be AI technology, which could be either used for powering new weapons systems or integrated into existing infrastructure, such as command, control, and communications of nuclear weapon systems. Either AI technology itself will become the primary strategic weapon—or it will enable the rapid creation of alternatives that render nuclear arsenals increasingly irrelevant to real-world outcomes.
AI technology already compresses decision-making timelines and enables continuous competition below the threshold of declared war. It allows countries to exert coercive pressure through cyber operations, information manipulation, autonomous systems, and precision-strike capabilities that do not trigger the same existential fear as nuclear escalation would. But AI-powered weapon systems can nonetheless reshape battlefields and, potentially, geopolitical realities.
In this environment, nuclear weapons begin to look strangely blunt. They are catastrophic, but unusable. They inspire fear, but not necessarily restraint. They no longer prevent adversaries from striking directly at a nuclear-armed state’s territory, infrastructure, or proxies. Instead, they sit in the background while conflicts are fought with tools that are faster, cheaper, and politically easier to employ. But nuclear weapons are still hanging in the air, should a crisis escalate to that level.
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On the margins, the displacement of nuclear weapons also helps explain a puzzling dynamic in today’s US-Russian relationship. The traditional Soviet and Russian so-called “lever of strategic stability”—that is, the implicit warning that escalation could lead to nuclear catastrophe—appears to have lost much of its influence in Washington. US policymakers increasingly behave as if nuclear risk can be managed, compartmentalized to a limited exchange, or simply accepted as the price of pursuing other strategic goals.
From a classical deterrence perspective, this would have once been unthinkable.
The real-world risk is not that nuclear weapons will suddenly disappear from global politics. They will not. But they might persist more as symbols while losing their practical role as stabilizers, creating a more dangerous world in which countries are neither safely deterred nor meaningfully disarmed.
At the same time, AI-driven competition between nuclear-armed states risks producing a new kind of instability in which escalation is constant, ambiguous, and difficult to control. Unlike with nuclear arms control, which relied on relatively slow-moving technologies and verifiable limits, risk reduction of AI-powered weapon systems must deal with technologies that evolve rapidly and lack transparency. Despite some efforts toward regulation of AI, the habits and institutions designed to manage nuclear risk remain poorly suited to this new reality.
Nuclear deterrence is not collapsing with a bang. It is fading, quietly and unevenly, as the strategic center of gravity shifts elsewhere. To preserve stability, the decline of nuclear deterrence can no longer be ignored. Otherwise, the next shock—technological or geopolitical—will catch us unprepared.
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Keywords: Donald Trump, Medvedev, New START, Russia, United States, nuclear arms control, nuclear deterrence, nuclear deterrence theory
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