Financial TimesOctober 31, 2025US and Russia can lead on nuclear-armed drones ban
Rose GottemoellerThe writer is a lecturer at Stanford University and former deputy secretarygeneral of NATONot so long ago, Vladimir Putin took a step that astonished me: he called for extending the limits of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New Start) for one year beyond February 5, 2026, when it is due to go out of force.
It was Putin who pulled the plug on implementing the treaty in February 2023, blaming Joe Biden for assisting Kyiv and not respecting Russia’s security interests. Now he seems to be having second thoughts, telling his Security Council that discarding the beneficial aspects of the treaty would be a mistake.
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Keeping the New Start limits in place will give additional time to President Donald Trump, who is enthusiastic about limiting nuclear weapons, to figure out what he wants to do not only with the Russians, but also with the Chinese, who are quickly building nuclear weapons in a way that has everyone worried.
But there is an even more urgent problem out there than the Chinese build-up. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy first called attention to it at the United Nations General Assembly last month: “Now, there are tens of thousands of people who know how to professionally kill using drones . . . who will be the first to create a simple drone carrying a nuclear warhead?”
Mass drone attacks have played such a significant role in this war that by some accounts, it is only days between the time when new drone technologies are fielded and defensive countermeasures against them appear. What is more, they have also appeared in the hands of non-state actors such as the Houthis, who have used them to attack shipping in the Red Sea.
Accurate, inexpensive drones are becoming ubiquitous instruments of war. If they are the new reality, then we have every interest in preventing them from becoming a new means to deliver nuclear weapons. Nuclear warheads on drones should be banned outright.
Drones are unmanned aerial vehicles, some of which fly like helicopters, some like air-breathing missiles. Depending on size and fuel capacity, their ranges are quite varied. Some would be too small, with too little lift capacity, to carry a nuclear warhead.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which went out of force in 2019, defined shorter-range missiles as those between 500km and 1,000km in range; intermediaterange missiles as those between 1,000km and 5,500km.
Returning to this treaty and its definitions would be one place to start. INF was designed as a ban on nucleararmed missiles across those ranges, but in fact it banned all such missiles, conventional and nuclear.
The reason at the time was simple: the US and Soviet Union had not done a single on-site inspection when it was being negotiated, so no one could imagine how such a ban could be monitored. How could we verify that nuclear-tipped missiles were not being secretly deployed?
Nowadays, we could update the INF to include categories of drones that would be capable of carrying nuclear warheads. And we would be in a much better position to monitor a ban on such nuclear drones — which is essentially a ban on shorter- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
Nuclear weapons are maintained in a closed security system, carefully monitored and protected from mishandling or theft in every country that has them.
So, every country deploying nuclear weapons will have the same concern. None of them will want to see their warheads straying outside their closed security system and falling into the wrong hands.
If any sign of nuclear handling equipment or procedures appeared at a base where only conventional missiles should be, then that would be grounds for an explanation, or inspection.
With commercial as well as government satellites providing abundant images and information about military bases across the globe, nuclear operations at facilities where there should be none will be harder to hide.
A ban on such missiles is a difficult problem, but it is one that can be negotiated. If a state wants a carve-out to deploy some nuclear-armed intermediate-range missiles for a particular mission, it should be willing to designate how many, where they are deployed, and for how long.
No one should ever be surprised by a nuclear detonation in the midst of a drone swarm. Banning nuclear weapons on drones, whether they are shorter and intermediate-range missiles should be a goal that every nuclear state can embrace.