The age of Biden is just full of bad things happening in the world.
The latest is that Putin has officially pulled out of the START Treaty by signing an official decree suspending it:
Global security was flung into a state of ambiguity last week after Russian President Vladimir Putin "suspended" Moscow's participation in the New START treaty and forced the U.S. to re-enter an age of nuclear instability.
The suspension of the treaty marks the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the conclusion of the Cold War that the U.S. and Russia are not actively engaged in a joint nuclear treaty.
"We are entering an extremely dangerous decade of which nuclear employment is once again [a] potential," Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute and an expert on strategic deterrence, told Fox News Digital. "Thinking about it in a realistic way needs to be back into the American consciousness."
President Biden called Putin's decision a "big mistake" and reports have since surfaced suggesting that Russia may be planning to deploy new nuclear systems as experts question what is next for nuclear deterrence amid the war in Ukraine.
Heinrichs explained that nuclear deterrence is no longer just about restricting the number of arms a nation can have at its disposal; it's about countering nuclear capabilities.
"Whenever you think about deterrence," she began, "it's not just about numbers. It's also about [what] we have."
The expert explained that deterrence only works if an adversarial nation thinks that any action they carry out could be adequately responded to with an equal or greater threat to their own security.
Moscow already knows the U.S. has powerful nuclear warheads. The threat of nuclear warfare is not on the same level as it was in the 20th century when the core principle of deterrence was established between Washington and Moscow – mutually assured destruction.
The top threat now lies in how nuclear weapons can be employed in the theater of war and whether the U.S. can appropriately respond to low-yield nuclear capabilities.
"If the Russians are going to threaten to launch a weapon in the European theater, do we have sufficient kinds of weapons that they would believe that we would respond [with]?" Heinrichs questioned. "Are they really going to believe that we're going to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile at their missile sites if they launch a low yield nuclear weapon in Ukraine? No."
Heinrichs said that Russia has been "doggedly" focused on creating more advanced capabilities than the U.S. in terms of "nuclear delivery systems" for the last 15 years.
"When we think about nuclear modernization for ourselves, we're talking about maintaining our systems," she said. "Russians think about modernizing their nuclear weapons [by making] new ones."
This is not good for the next decade, especially considering that Russia and China are becoming closer allies.
Also since Russia is involved in a war that has undoubtedly stretched its resources to the maximum, the unrestrained development of powerful nuclear weapons as well as deployment methods would seem to be a priority.
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