Making Sense of Trump’s Talk of ‘Denuclearization’

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.