By John Seiler
John's Newsletter
February 7, 2026
I suggest you say some extra prayers - that we don't blow up the world.
Today, Feb. 5, the New Start Treaty on arms control expired. For the first time since 1972, we have no nuclear arms control treaties with the Soviets - excuse me, the Russians. President Putin suggested tacitly extending New Start for another year to allow negotiators to craft a new treaty. All Trump had to say was, "Yes." He didn't.
Here's the sitrep:
Each side under New Start was allowed to wield 1,550 "deployed, accountable warheads" carried by 700 "delivery vehicles." The latter are strategic bombers, ICBMS - intercontinental ballistic missiles - and SLBMs - submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Note "accountable." We account for the Russian weapons and they account for ours.
That's all gone.
Here's the key: The US has 60 and Russia 65 nuclear-capable bombers, which possibly could be stopped. The other delivery vehicles, about 1,490 SLBMs and ICBMs on each side, cannot be stopped. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, or Star Wars, didn't work. He announced it with great fanfare in 1983 and I wrote many editorials backing it. Trump's Golden Dome is just one of his fever dreams. But if it somehow could work, it's at least a decade away. The technology just isn't ready.
Let's say we double the warheads to 3,100. It only would mean "making the rubble bounce," to use an old Cold War phrase. 1,550 warheads are more than enough to kill every American. And, again, except for those on the bombers, the bombs can't be stopped.
The point of Trump, say, doubling the warheads would be to try to "catch them with their pants down," to quote Gen. Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove. I refer again to Anne Jacobsen's 2024 book, "Nuclear War," which I reviewed in " 72 Minutes to Nuclear Armageddon." Here's the timeline, from her research in Pentagon declassified documents:
6 minutes: President Trump or President Putin must decide, in a crisis, whether to launch his country's nuclear arsenal at the other country and kill everybody there.
26 minutes: The time it takes an ICBM to launch in Russia or America and fly over the North Pole and hit the other country and kill millions of people.
72 minutes: The time global annihilation is irreversible and 5 billion of 8 billion will die.
So if we had 3,100 nuclear warheads instead of 1,550, the U.S. could, maybe, just maybe, conduct a "decapitation strike" within that 6 minute frame and prevent Putin from responding. Maybe the CIA has intel Putin is busy with his mistress and ordered his security detail, "Don't interrupt, even if there's a nuclear attack!" It would be something like the U.S.-Israeli decapitation strike on the Iranian leadership last June 13, Operation Rising Lion. Which didn't work.
As you can see, it's all madness. Part of the madness is the irresponsible media either not reporting this, or misreporting it. A good example of the latter is CNN, which during the Ted Turner's days in the Cold War practically was pacifist. Now they're neocon Armageddonites like seemingly everybody else. Consider this article yesterday, " A key nuclear weapons treaty is ending. It's a sign of Russia's eroding superpower status," by Matthew Chance, CNN Chief Global Affairs Correspondent.
This is remarkable as an example of a journalist 100% contradicting his own story internally, in this case right at the top with this picture:
The Russian word POBEDA ! means "Forward!" The CNN caption reads: "A Russian Yars intercontinental ballistic missile rolls on Red Square during the Victory Day parade in central Moscow on May 19, 2024."
By the way, for Russia that's Victory Over Hitler Day for them, in which they lost 27 million killed by him to defeat Nazism.
If CNN had done even a simple Wikipedia search, here's what they would have learned, and maybe told their readers:
The RS-24 Yars... also known as Topol-MR, is a Russian MIRV-equipped, thermonuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missile first tested on May 29, 2007, after a secret military R&D project.
MIRV is " Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle." That means each missile carries more than one bomb, in the Yars' case, three bombs. Each bomb is 200 kilotons, or 10 times the Hiroshima bomb. Each bomb can, when burst over a populated area, kill up to 3 million people. That means one Yars could kill every person in New York City.
CNN:
The demise of the last arms control deal between the US and Russia - which Washington repeatedly accused Moscow of violating by denying inspections of Russian nuclear facilities - has been brushed off by the Trump administration, with the US president himself shrugging off the terrifying prospect of a world without nuclear limits.
"If it expires, it expires," Trump quipped in January, while suggesting a "better" deal may eventually be done.
CNN provides no evidence of Moscow "violating" the treaty. Maybe they are. Solution: Better inspection protocols. As to Trump, the problem is, unless he quickly agrees to the one-year extension, still possible, it will be difficult to restart negotiations. Arms control is highly technical, even for politicians more detail-oriented than Trump.
CNN:
That distinct lack of urgency from Washington stands in stark contrast to the anxiety in Moscow, where there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the arms reduction issue.
Actually, Russia is at least a decade ahead of us in developing new nuclear weapons, such as the Yars. The most terrifying is the Poseidon, a nuclear torpedo with a 100 megaton nuclear warhead. That's 5,000 times the Hiroshima bomb. One Poseidon bomb would cause a giant tsunami wiping out the entire New York City metro area. Others would wipe out Boston, Washington, D.C., Savannah, Miami, etc., just on the East Coast. Here's a video:
You think maybe arms control to prevent the Poseidon's deployment would be in the U.S. national interest ? Trump and CNN don't.
CNN:
Apart from being deprived of an arms-reduction platform that grandstands one of their last remaining vestiges of Soviet-era power, Moscow is now facing a future of potentially unconstrained US nuclear expansion.
The Trump administration has, for example, already re-floated the idea of nuclear-armed "Trump-class" battleships, a Cold War era policy that was abandoned decades ago.
Battleships became obsolete on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan Pearl Harbor'd four of them. That forced the U.S. Navy to depend on our aircraft carriers, which turned out to be the strategic asset in the Pacific War.
CNN:
The old Soviet Union could have matched it. But with an economy and a defense budget that are a fraction of Washington's, Moscow has virtually no hope of keeping up - exacerbating the already vast gap in power and leverage between the old rivals.
The Soviet Union's problem was it overextended, such as trying to build a U.S.-style globe-spanning Navy, which the USSR's rickety old socialist economy couldn't support. Today Russia has a mixed market-socialist economy like every country, including the U.S. (Have you seen your tax bill lately ? Socialism.) And according to the Purchasing Power Parity calculation, Russia is the world's fourth largest economy:
That means Russia's economy can sustain a new nuclear arms race, although it will be hurt by the extra expense. But so will we ! Nuclear arms are not cheap. And our Military Industrial Complex charges a lot more for the same weapons. Neither CNN nor Trump has told us how much building all these pointless new nuclear weapons will cost. Maybe that's why Trump wants to increase War Department spending by $500 billion, or 50%. What a waste.
It's all so senseless. So I'll end with the video I've posted before. It's of the Tsar Bomba , a 57 megaton blast the Soviets exploded in 1961 on Novaya Zemlya, an island in the arctic. Horror movies don't scare me. They're fake. This video scares me every time I see it. It's real. Maybe they should explode one again to scare everybody - again. It was 2,850 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb. But only 57% of the Poseidon bomb describe above that could be exploded near your beautiful coastal city.
Finally, once again it's ironic the Peace President I strongly supported in Nov. 2024 has become the opposite.
This article was originally published on John's Newsletter.