For fifty years, the survival of civilization has rested in part on a fragile architecture of treaties governing the most destructive weapons ever built. The New START Treaty is the last of them still standing-the only agreement placing verifiable, enforceable limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia. This Nimble Books edition presents the central limits and key provisions of that treaty alongside a full apparatus of original editorial scholarship, making one of the defining documents of twenty-first-century arms control accessible to scholars, students, and general readers alike.
Signed in Prague on April 8, 2010, by Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev and entered into force on February 5, 2011, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty deliberately fused two opposing traditions of arms control. From the original START of 1991 it inherited a rigorous transparency regime: detailed definitions, a comprehensive shared database, movement notifications, and short-notice on-site inspections. From the 2002 Moscow Treaty it took the elegant simplicity of a single aggregate ceiling and the freedom of each side to determine its own mix of forces. The result retained the predictability of Cold War verification while shedding much of its cost and rigidity.
The treaty imposes three central limits. A ceiling of 800 deployed and nondeployed launchers for intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and heavy bombers. Within that, a sublimit of 700 deployed delivery vehicles. And a cap of 1,550 deployed warheads-counting actual reentry vehicles on missiles plus one attributed warhead per heavy bomber. Equally important is what the treaty leaves untouched: it does not constrain missile defense, modernization, nonstrategic "tactical" weapons, or warhead stockpiles. Its conversion and elimination procedures are far less destructive than START's, allowing silos to be filled with debris rather than excavated and submarine tubes neutralized in place. By the February 2018 deadline, both parties had completed their reductions-from arsenals that once exceeded ten thousand warheads each.
The treaty's genius lies less in its ceilings than in the verification that makes them meaningful: national technical means, a continuously updated database keyed to unique missile identifiers, and up to eighteen annual on-site inspections, including random reentry-vehicle counting that deters cheating probabilistically rather than through exhaustive enumeration. When the treaty neared its 2021 expiration, a contentious extension debate ended with the Biden Administration securing the full five-year extension through an exchange of diplomatic notes-pushing the verifiable limits to February 5, 2026. With the INF and ABM treaties gone and START and the Moscow Treaty lapsed, New START became the sole remaining window into the world's two largest nuclear postures.
This edition faithfully reproduces the official text of the treaty's central limits and key provisions. To it, Nimble Books has added a substantial editorial apparatus prepared expressly for this volume: an original Historical Context essay tracing the lineage from START I through SORT to New START and the 2021 extension; two complementary plain-language abstracts-an accessible explain-it-simply summary and an advanced analytical summary engaging the verification architecture and unresolved compliance questions; a Glossary of arms-control terminology; comprehensive Indexes of persons, places, and concepts; and an original computational RKHS knowledge-graph analysis that situates the treaty among related works in strategic studies. For diplomats, policy analysts, military historians, students of international security, librarians, and any reader seeking to understand the agreement on which strategic stability still depends, this is an indispensable and authoritative reference.
