The Republic is a journal published by The Palantir Foundation, featuring commentary and essays on technology, national security policy, and international affairs.

A Fresh Start for Arms Control

John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath 1851–3, Tate Britain.

A Fresh Start for Arms Control

The Trump administration should call a trilateral nuclear summit between China, Russia, and the United States.

By

Alex Alfirraz Scheers is a London-based defense analyst and writer, who holds a master’s degree in National Security Studies from King’s College London

It is 85 seconds to midnight according to the Doomsday Clock—the closest the world has ever been to global catastrophe.1 On February 4, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expired.2 It was the last remaining nuclear arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia. At 3,700 and 4,309, active nuclear warheads apiece, together the two states possess around 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads.3,4,5

As the nuclear scholar Erin Dumbacher has warned, “today, the danger of nuclear war is greater than it has been in decades.”6 Against this backdrop, the Trump administration should seize the initiative and propose a trilateral nuclear summit between China, Russia and the United States. The aim would not be to resurrect the old arms control order, but to adapt it to a tripolar world and to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation between the great nuclear powers.

Since the end of the Cold War, Washington and Moscow have made sustained efforts to cap and reduce their strategic arsenals. As of February 4, neither country is legally bound to limit the number of nuclear weapons it can produce or deploy. This marks a decisive break with the post–Cold War trajectory of arms control.

“The era of reductions in the number of nuclear weapons in the world,” as the Federation of American Scientists researcher Hans Kristensen starkly put it, “is coming to an end.”7 In other words, we are at the precipice of a new nuclear arms race, the likes of which we haven’t seen for nearly four decades.

The New Realist Paradigm

This shift reflects a broader transformation in international politics. The liberal international order is decaying, multilateralism is weakening, and great-power competition is fast becoming the organizing principle of global security.

China, Russia and the United States increasingly operate according to rules of their own making, guided less by international norms and more by power maximization. In this emerging hard realist paradigm, arms control cannot be about idealistic nuclear disarmament. It must instead be about managing rivalry and preventing the outbreak of all-out nuclear war.

A trilateral China-Russia-US nuclear summit should not be conceived as a one-off, but rather as the first in a series to address the inadequacies of the current nuclear order. Many existing treaties are either unratified, outdated or ill-suited to contemporary realities. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty remains unenforced; the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is detached from strategic reality.8,9 Meanwhile, cornerstone agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) were negotiated for a very different era.10,11

Nuclear weapons have not disappeared because they continue to serve as a reliable strategic deterrent, dissuading the great powers from waging war against each other. Furthermore, the great powers are not moving towards disarmament. Quite the opposite. They are modernizing, expanding and diversifying their arsenals. In this context, insisting on disarmament as the ultimate goal of arms control—as enshrined in Article VI of the NPT—is not only unrealistic but also undesirable, and it risks paralyzing more achievable forms of cooperation.12

Rather than pursuing the abolition of nuclear weapons, the priority should be to ensure that they are never used. That requires additional confidence-building measures, transparency and sustained engagement between the great nuclear powers.

A Presidential Nuclear Forum

To that end, the United States, China and Russia should establish a standing presidential-level nuclear consultative forum. The rationale is simple: Presidents Trump, Putin, and, to a lesser extent, Xi, hold sole launch authority over their nuclear arsenals.13 In the event of a crisis or conflict, the ultimate decision to go nuclear rests with them.

Such a body would bring together the three heads of state and senior military officials responsible for nuclear policy and planning. Its purpose would be to clarify doctrines, reduce misperceptions and manage tensions where they might arise.

These concerns are not merely theoretical. In the United States, debates about expanding nuclear forces and adopting more flexible war-fighting options have raised questions about whether deterrence remains the primary utility of nuclear weapons.14 Russia’s doctrine of escalate to de-escalate remains both poorly understood and poorly explained.15 China’s rapid nuclear expansion (when Xi took office in 2013, China had 250 nuclear warheads; latest estimates by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists place that figure at 600), combined with ambiguity over whether it still adheres to a no-first-use policy,[v] has fueled anxiety in Washington and beyond.16,17

Emerging Threats to Strategic Stability

Furthermore, the summit would give the great powers the opportunity to address a multitude of emerging threats to the international security landscape.

The weaponization of space, hypersonic weapons, the integration of artificial intelligence into nuclear command, control and communications systems, and the renewed threat of nuclear testing are all equally destabilizing and pose severe challenges to global security.18,19,20

Proliferation risks also persist, with countries such as Japan, South Korea and Iran all potentially in line to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities.21 Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025, in which the United States and Israel coordinated devastating attacks on Iran’s main nuclear facilities, set its nuclear program back.22 The Iran War, which started on February 28, has all but made sure that the Iranian nuclear threat has been neutralized, at least for now.

Creating a new framework to tackle these emerging issues would institute an arms control regime fit for the 21st century. It would also provide clarity amid rising geopolitical uncertainty. Greater clarity would not eliminate rivalry, but it would bring greater transparency and cultivate a deeper sense of trust and predictability. And predictability is the foundation of strategic stability.

Realism Demands Diplomacy

“Out with utopian idealism, in with hard-nosed realism,” declared U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, in the latest National Defense Strategy.23 Whether one welcomes it or not, this sentiment captures the prevailing mood in Washington. Yet realism does not preclude diplomacy. It demands that diplomacy be grounded in securing vital interests rather than illusions of a rules-based order, which Hegseth damningly described as “cloud-castle abstractions.”

A trilateral nuclear summit is not a panacea and will not abate the nascent nuclear arms race overnight. However, it would reduce geopolitical tensions between Beijing, Moscow and Washington, and dissuade the great powers from the temptation to shift from deterrence to more aggressive nuclear postures. It would also dial down the perceived animosity that has permeated the relationship between these countries for the last decade, which would be a boon for global peace.

Love it or hate it, President Trump’s personality, while at times manifestly disconcerting, enables him to maintain relationships with President Xi and President Putin in ways none of his predecessors could. In this instance, harnessing those relationships could serve a constructive role in nuclear diplomacy.

And the three leaders have struck conciliatory notes on nuclear cooperation in the past and have signaled an openness to curbing the nascent arms race. Trump has intimated a wish for a world without nuclear weapons in the past.24 He stated, “It would be great if everybody would get rid of their nuclear weapons.” Putin suggested extending New START by a year, demonstrating a willingness to uphold elements of the arms control order, and Xi has long argued for a universal no-first-use treaty, which would formally institutionalize the preclusion of the first use of nuclear weapons in a crisis or conflict scenario as a nuclear policy prerequisite.25,26

These are positive signs that reveal the appetite to engage in arms control is there. But these gestures need to be backed up with action. At a joint nuclear summit, China, Russia and the United States can build on these silver linings.

Leveraging Economic Compellence

Should Russia and China resist calls to join the United States in establishing a new arms control framework, the Trump administration should leverage economic incentives to encourage participation. Employing a compellence strategy for arms control would raise the stakes and clarify the costs and benefits to influence Chinese and Russian strategic and economic calculations. It would also send a message that the United States is committed to overcoming the current arms control malaise and to establishing a new order.

Currently, Russia is heavily sanctioned by the United States, and Washington imposes export tariffs of close to 50 percent on China.27,28 Trump could threaten to increase punitive economic measures to compel Putin and Xi to participate in a trilateral summit. Or, conversely, Trump could offer to reduce tariffs, ease trade barriers, and impose sanctions as inducements in exchange for participation.

For all intents and purposes, the international rules-based order is over. As the Doomsday Clock ticks ever closer to Armageddon, a trilateral nuclear summit between China, Russia and the United States could engender the kind of arms control revival that the world so urgently needs. Despite the end of New START, a fresh start is possible.

  1. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “It is now 85 seconds to midnight,” January 27, 2026. ↩︎
  2. Xiaodon Liang, “New START at a Glance,” Arms Control Association, December 2024. ↩︎
  3. Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “United States Nuclear Weapons, 2025,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 13, 2025. ↩︎
  4. Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Russian Nuclear Weapons, 2025,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 13, 2025. ↩︎
  5. Hans M. Kristensen, “Nuclear Notebook,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. ↩︎
  6. Erin Dumbacher, “How Deepfakes Could Lead to Doomsday,” Foreign Affairs, December 29, 2025. ↩︎
  7. Hans M. Kristensen, quoted in Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “Nuclear Risks Grow as New Arms Race Looms—New SIPRI Yearbook Out Now,” SIPRI Yearbook Press Release, June 16, 2025. ↩︎
  8. Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, “Text of the Treaty.” ↩︎
  9. United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, “Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” ↩︎
  10. U.S. Department of State, “Outer Space Treaty,” 2009–2017 Archive. ↩︎
  11. United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.” ↩︎
  12. U.S. Department of State, “Article VI, Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” 2009–2017 Archive. ↩︎
  13. Rivka Galchen, “Why Don’t We Take Nuclear Weapons Seriously?” The New Yorker, September 2, 2025. ↩︎
  14. Matthew Kroenig, “The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy,” Oxford University Press, 2018. ↩︎
  15. Mattias Elken et al., “Understanding Russian strategic culture and the low-yield nuclear threat,” RAND Corporation, August 17, 2025. ↩︎
  16. Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Chinese Nuclear Weapons, 2025,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 12, 2025. ↩︎
  17. Jamestown Foundation, “The 2013 Defense White Paper in Perspective,” April 25, 2013. ↩︎
  18. Aaron Bateman, “Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative,” MIT Press, 2024. ↩︎
  19. Marion Messmer, “What Happens If AI Goes Nuclear?”  Chatham House, June 9, 2025. ↩︎
  20. Max Matza, “Trump directs nuclear weapons testing to resume for first time in over 30 years,” BBC News, October 30, 2025. ↩︎
  21. Bilahari Kausikan, “The Inevitable Logic of a Japanese Nuclear Weapons,” Foreign Policy, November 24, 2025. ↩︎
  22. Rosie Laydon, “Precision, deception and silence: Midnight Hammer, the surprise strike on Iran,” Forces News, June 25, 2025. ↩︎
  23. U.S. Department of War, “2026 National Defense Strategy: Restoring Peace Through Strength For a Golden Age of America” Washington, DC, January 23, 2026. ↩︎
  24. Jesus Mesa and Gabe Whisnant, “Donald Trump Wants to ‘Get Rid’ of Nuclear Weapons,” Newsweek, March 6, 2025. ↩︎
  25. Xiaodon Liang, “Russia Proposes One-Year New START Extension,” Arms Control Today, Arms Control Association, October 2025. ↩︎
  26. Benjamin Hautecouverture, “Chinese no-first-use: a strategic signaling device, diplomatic tool and dogmatic reality,” Fondation pour la recherche stratégique, April 4, 2025. ↩︎
  27. Office of Foreign Assets Control, U.S. Department of the Treasury,  “Russia-related Sanctions.” ↩︎
  28. Chad P. Bown, “US-China Trade War Tariffs: An Up-to-Date Chart,” Peterson Institute for International Economics, November 14, 2025. ↩︎