The Treaty between the US and Russia is helping to enhance US national security. This places limits on all Russian-deployed intercontinental-range nuclear weapons. The US and Russian Federation have agreed to uphold this treaty until February 2026. This treaty was first put into place in February of 2011. From 2011 to 2018, the US and Russian Federation had seven years to meet the treaty’s limits and are now expected to maintain these limits as long as the treaty is enforced. Since 2018, the US and Russia have been able to stay at or below those limits. These limits include only having 700 deployed missiles, including missiles on submarines and heavy bombers. This also included only having 1,500 nuclear warheads and 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers equipped for nuclear armaments. All Russian-deployed atomic weapons have been limited if they can reach the US in approximately 30 minutes.
This treaty also limits the deployed Avangard for long-range reach to the US. This specific limit is supposed to be put in place for the next five years. As of 2020, Russia is said to have the capacity to deploy over 1,500 warheads. This includes heavy bombers. This is forbidden to do so because of the START Treaty. The START Treaty entails onsite inspections and only allows warheads to be loaded on specific strategic delivery vehicles and Biannual Data Exchanges. The treaty also requires telemetric information, launcher notifications, unique identifiers, and other rules. This treaty ensures that this can reduce the risks of strategic surprise, mistrust, or miscalculations. Since the START treaty was implemented, the US and Russia have had 328 onsite inspections, 23,449 notifications exchanged, 19 meetings about the Bilateral Consultative Commission, and 42 biannual data exchanges.
The treaty’s original duration was supposed to be ten years, which would have meant it ended in 2021, but both parties agreed to extend the treaty for another five years. Russia’s Federation has been said to have criticized how the US does its procedures for converting heavy bombers into launchers. This didn’t stop the US from still going through with their procedures with the nuclear weapons.
The START Treaty requires 18 onsite inspections per year. There are two different ways these inspections are done. Type one’s inspection focuses on sites with deployed and non-deployed strategic systems. Type two’s inspection focuses on sites with only non-deployed strategic systems. This permits confirming the number of reentry vehicles, confirming numbers related to non-deployed launcher limits, counting nuclear onboard or possibly attached heavy bombers, conforming weapon conversion systems, and confirming facility eliminations. It allows 18 onsite inspections because each side can only conduct ten type one inspections and 8 type two inspections. This happens annually.
