Kremlin says Golden Dome could lead to U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control

A Kremlin spokesperson said last week that President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome plan could force both Washington and Moscow to resume nuclear arms control talks, media reported.

“In the foreseeable future, the very course of events requires the resumption of contacts on issues of strategic stability,” Dmitry Peskov told Reuters. 

Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Tuesday announced key details of the planned Golden Dome missile defense architecture, with an expected total cost of $175 billion and timeline to be ready within three years and be run by the Vice Chief of Space Operations.

The Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars” by headline writers, was a proposed missile defense system that then-President Ronald Reagan announced in 1983. While the Star Wars initiative was never realized, it envisioned a space-based missile defense system most similar to Trump’s Golden Dome that he announced originally as the “Iron Dome for America” in a January executive order.

Peskov had also said in April that there was little chance of a replacement for the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which runs out in February 2026. When the nuclear-arms-control treaty between the U.S. and Russia runs out, each country is free to deploy more of its largest nuclear weapons.

Peskov reportedly said in April that there was not enough trust between Russia and the U.S. to start a new treaty. Peskov also echoed the statements of former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev that more countries would obtain nuclear weapons. Medvedev said he believed this was because the West pushed the world to the “brink of World War Three” by getting involved in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. 

“Now that the legal framework in this area has been destroyed, and the validity period has expired, or deliberately, let’s say, a number of documents have ceased to be valid, this base must be recreated both in the interests of our two countries and in the interests of security throughout the planet,” Peskov said to Reuters last week.