For the first time in over half a century, there are no nuclear arms controls in place

between the world's two largest nuclear powers, the U.S. and Russia, with a rising China

growing its nuclear arsenal.

While it continues to assert its power on the international stage, we ask, is this the beginning of a new Cold War era?

Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Tuesday, February 10, 26.

The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the U.S. and Russia, also known as START,

expired last week, and with it, a long-dormant fear of the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Should we be worried?

Joining me now to dig into the critical geopolitical, economic, and military concerns at the heart of this story is Ankit Ponda, a senior fellow with the Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me. Really happy to be here. I want to start with some broad strokes here.

Can you please lay out what the START treaty was and why it was so critical to maintaining

international security while it was in effect? Sure. So the START treaty was and why it was so critical to maintaining international security while it was

in effect. Sure. So the START treaty continued essentially something we started doing with first the

Soviet Union and then Russia in the early 1970s. In 1972, we begin a process of decades of

essentially some type of numerical limits on the sizes of the Russian and American

nuclear arsenals. And that has a lot of effects. It means that we have to spend less money,

that we have to be less concerned about the types of unpredictability that might exist.

And so in 2010, the Obama administration and the Russian Federation, it was a very different

time. we had very

different relations with Russia. We negotiated this treaty, and this treaty continued that process.

It set a ceiling for the numbers of strategic nuclear weapons, strategic basically just means

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