COUNTDOWN TO CHAOS

From the collapse of a key nuclear treaty to the Iran war, the world is drifting towards an unregulated nuclear competition

- AJISH P. JOY

On May 22, 1972, Richard Nixon stepped off Air Force One in Moscow and made history as the first American president to set foot on Soviet soil. Only a decade earlier, the Cuban missile crisis had brought the two superpowers to the edge of a nuclear war. Now Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had chosen a different path, to put an end to the nuclear arms race.

But putting a ceiling on the most dangerous weapons ever built was not an easy matter for either man.

Nixon was a lifelong anti-communist, sitting down to negotiate limits with the very empire he had spent a career denouncing. Brezhnev, for his part, was neither a liberal reformer nor a man given to sentimentality.

After two days of talks, Brezhnev settled on an unusual diplomatic manoeuvre. He grabbed Nixon by the arm, took the wheel of the 1972 Cadillac Eldorado he had just been gifted by the American president, and drove out of the Kremlin gates, leaving the Secret Service, in Henry Kissinger's words, "beside themselves". Stripped of advisers and protocol, the two leaders found space for a conversation the formal table had never allowed. Forty-eight hours later, in the gilded St Catherine Hall, Nixon sat across from Brezhnev and signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Agreement, the first treaty in history to cap nuclear weapons.

More than five decades on, those guardrails are gone. New START, the last bilateral nuclear treaty between the US and Russia, lapsed in February, removing the final legally binding limits on the world's two largest nuclear arsenals. Together they control roughly 90 per cent of the global nuclear inventory-more than 10,000 warheads, enough to devastate organised human civilisation several times over. For arms control experts, the treaty's demise is not merely the end of a single agreement, but the collapse of five decades of structured nuclear restraint.