Why in news?

The expiry of the New START Treaty marks the end of five decades of binding nuclear limits between the US and Russia, raising global concerns about strategic stability and the risk of a renewed nuclear arms race.

What’s in Today’s Article?

• Cold War Arms Control Efforts
• Post–Cold War Nuclear Arms Reduction
• A New Phase in US–Russia Arms Control
• After New START: What Lies Ahead

Cold War Arms Control Efforts

• In the late 1960s, at the peak of the Cold War, the Soviet Union began expanding its intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) arsenal to match the United States.
• In January 1967, US President Lyndon B. Johnson warned that Moscow was developing an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system around its capital, raising fears of a destabilising first-strike capability.
• SALT Talks and Early Treaties
  • To curb the escalating arms race, Washington and Moscow launched the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in November 1969.
  • These negotiations produced two key agreements:
    • The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which capped missile defence systems at 200 (later reduced to 100) per side.
    • An interim SALT accord under which both sides agreed not to expand their ICBM capabilities.
• SALT II and Its Collapse
• Negotiations for a follow-up pact, SALT II, began in 1972 and culminated in a 1979 agreement limiting nuclear delivery vehicles—such as ICBMs, submarine-launched missiles, and strategic bombers—to 2,250 each.
• However, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, US President Jimmy Carter withdrew the treaty from Senate consideration, and it was never ratified.
• Unravelling of Controls
  • Years later, the US unilaterally exited the ABM Treaty in 2002, arguing it constrained defences against terrorist and rogue-state missile threats.
  • This marked an early step in the gradual erosion of Cold War-era arms control frameworks.

Post–Cold War Nuclear Arms Reduction

• After the Cold War, the US and Russia signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) in 1991.
• It required both sides to cap deployed strategic delivery systems at 1,600 and reduce nuclear warheads to 6,000.
• Crucially, START I mandated the destruction of excess missiles and bombers, backed by an intrusive verification regime that included on-site inspections, data exchanges, and satellite monitoring.
• Because of the Soviet Union’s collapse and efforts to denuclearise former Soviet states, implementation took longer than expected.
• The reductions were completed only in December 2001, and the treaty expired in 2009.
• START II: An Unfulfilled Follow-on
  • A second agreement, START II, was signed in January 1993. It aimed to cut strategic warheads further, to 3,000–3,500 by 2003.
  • However, the treaty never entered into force due to delays in ratification in both countries.
  • After the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, Russia formally withdrew from START II, and plans for a START III agreement collapsed.
• SORT: A Temporary Bridge
  • In May 2002, the two countries adopted the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), committing to reduce operationally deployed warheads to 1,700–2,200.
  • SORT came into force in 2003 after legislative approval in both countries.
  • It was conceived as an interim arrangement and was later superseded by the New START treaty in 2011.

A New Phase in US–Russia Arms Control

• In 2010, US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START).
• The agreement came into force on February 5, 2011, marking a renewed commitment to nuclear arms control after earlier treaties expired.
• Key Limits and Reductions
  • Under New START, both countries agreed to cap their strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550 and limit strategic delivery vehicles to 800, including both deployed and non-deployed systems.
  • These cuts were substantial, requiring about a 30% reduction in warheads and a 50% reduction in delivery vehicles compared to the earlier SORT agreement.
• Verification and Inspections
  • To ensure compliance, the treaty established a strong verification mechanism.
  • Each side was permitted to conduct up to 18 on-site inspections per year of the other’s strategic nuclear facilities, along with regular data exchanges.
• Extension and Expiry
  • The treaty allowed for a one-time extension. In 2021, after President Joe Biden took office, the US and Russia mutually agreed to extend New START by five years, setting its expiry date at February 5, 2026.

After New START: What Lies Ahead

• End of Legal Limits on Nuclear Arsenals - With the treaty’s expiry, binding caps on US and Russian nuclear warheads cease to exist. As of 2025, the US holds about 5,277 warheads and Russia around 5,449, raising concerns over unchecked expansion.
• Rising Risks and Loss of Transparency - Experts warn that the absence of arms control increases the danger of accidental or unintended escalation, especially amid regional conflicts involving Russia or China. Ending limits also reduces transparency over nuclear forces.
• Erosion of Nuclear Deterrence - Analysts argue that traditional nuclear deterrence is weakening as a stabilising force. The breakdown of arms control norms signals a shift toward open-ended strategic competition among major powers.
• Global Implications and Non-Proliferation Concerns - The lapse could undermine restraint worldwide, just ahead of the 2026 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review. While rethinking arms control is possible, experts caution that even limited mutual restraint is safer than unconstrained nuclear rivalry.

Context

• India’s latest defence budget represents a notable shift after years of stagnation, marking the first sustained double-digit increase in allocation and reaching 2% of GDP.
• In an unstable global environment, this increase signals strategic intent and a renewed emphasis on preparedness.
• However, higher spending alone does not guarantee improved outcomes.
• The real test lies in whether the allocation can translate into faster acquisition, stronger domestic capacity, and long-term capability through systemic reform rather than incremental adjustment.

Key Feature of the Budget Regarding the Defence

• A key feature of the budget is the renewed focus on modernisation, particularly through a significant rise in capital expenditure.
• This shift corrects years of imbalance in which revenue expenses dominated at the cost of future readiness.
• The Indian Air Force and Army benefit from substantial increases aimed at platforms, heavy vehicles, and weapons, strengthening operational credibility across multiple theatres.
• At the same time, the weakened currency reduces the purchasing power of these allocations, especially for imported systems, partially offsetting the headline gains.

The Good and the Bad

• The emphasis on domestic manufacturing is reinforced by reserving a large share of acquisition spending for local firms, further advancing indigenisation.
• Defence exports have expanded rapidly over the past decade, reflecting growing industrial competence and policy continuity.
• This progress shows that domestic production is no longer aspirational but achievable.
• However, not all services benefit equally. Despite its expanding role in the Indian Ocean, the Navy receives a comparatively modest increase, largely because of its ability to absorb funds efficiently.
• This exposes a paradox in allocation logic, where institutional efficiency may unintentionally constrain future growth.
• Another structural issue is the continued burden of pensions, which consume a substantial share of overall spending.
• Historically treated separately, their inclusion today limits flexibility and distorts comparisons with earlier periods when defence allocations were significantly higher as a share of GDP. 

Bureaucracy and Delays

• Beyond allocations, entrenched bureaucracy remains a central obstacle. Procurement procedures, particularly cost-focused procurement norms, favour established firms and disadvantage smaller players critical for innovation in a technology-driven sector.
• Without assured demand, predictable timelines, and long-term planning, private participation remains constrained.
• Chronic delays in major acquisition programmes further weaken outcomes.
• Projects approved decades ago continue to face shifting timelines, eroding deterrence and forcing repeated extensions of legacy platforms.
• These delays also result in underutilisation of allocated funds, with large sums returning unspent at the end of the fiscal year.
• The absence of a non-lapsable modernisation fund compounds this problem, allowing short-term fiscal convenience to override sustained capability development.

Challenges and the Way Ahead: R&D Lies Scattered

• Investment in R&D has increased, but research remains fragmented and poorly integrated with production and deployment.
• Despite the dual-use nature of many technologies, translation into operational advantage is limited.
• Overall spending on research remains low compared to global peers, and private-sector participation is minimal.
• Without unified direction and stronger collaboration with industry, incremental funding increases are unlikely to yield transformative results.
• The broader conceptual challenge lies in how defence spending is perceived.
• Framed narrowly as a trade-off against welfare, its wider contribution to infrastructure, employment, and growth is often overlooked.
• Programmes such as border connectivity and indigenous shipbuilding demonstrate strong multiplier effects across the economy, supporting long-term development alongside security. 

Conclusion

• The current budget reflects ambition and improved prioritisation, but outcomes will depend on execution.
• Aligning spending with industrial capacity, accelerating decision-making, integrating research, and revisiting outdated financial structures are essential.
• If pursued seriously, these changes can convert higher allocations into durable strength, reinforcing national autonomy in an increasingly contested world.

Context

• From the Aravalli ranges to coastal mangroves, India stands at a profound moral and constitutional crossroads.
• Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide offers a powerful metaphor for the present moment: nature remembers what law and power attempt to erase.
• Environmental safeguards are increasingly diluted in the name of development, raising concerns that the Constitution may become a silent witness to ecological loss.
• Such damage is neither abstract nor distant; its consequences, like the tide, return with relentless force.

Policy Shifts and Judicial Retreat in Environmental Protection

• Recent regulatory changes reflect a weakening of environmental safeguards.
• On December 18, 2025, non-coal mining projects were permitted to undertake Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) without specifying land location or area, reversing the principle of prior scrutiny.
• This was compounded by the Supreme Court’s recall of Vanashakti vs Union of India (2025), which had prohibited retrospective environmental clearances.
• Although a suo motu stay by Chief Justice Surya Kant temporarily restored institutional credibility, the broader trend reveals increasing judicial leniency, treating environmental law as a procedural formality rather than a substantive safeguard.

The Aravalli Controversy: Redefining Ecology Through Reductionism

• The Aravalli ranges illustrate this shift most starkly. As the ecological backbone of north-western India, they prevent desertification, recharge groundwater, stabilise soil, and sustain biodiversity.
• Earlier rulings, notably M.C. Mehta vs Union of India (2004) and subsequent orders up to 2010, recognised irreversible damage caused by unregulated mining and rejected narrow, height-based definitions.
• However, issue relating to Definition of Aravalli Hills and Ranges (2025) accepted a 100-metre elevation criterion, ignoring hydrology, ecological continuity, and geomorphology.
• This reductionist approach departs from the precautionary principle articulated in Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum vs Union of India (1996) and effectively removes protection from vast ecologically significant areas.

Constitutional Implications: Articles 21, 48A, 14, and Environmental Rights

• These developments have serious constitutional
• The right to a clean and healthy environment has been read into Article 21, while Article 48A obligates the state to protect and improve the environment, and Article 51A(g) places a corresponding duty on citizens.
• Judicial interpretations that enable ecological exclusion hollow out these provisions.
• Moreover, selective protection based solely on altitude creates an arbitrary classification with no rational nexus to ecological goals, violating the equality principle under Article 14.
• Such arbitrariness undermines both environmental justice and constitutional coherence.

Judicial Leniency and the Erosion of Environmental Deterrence

• The dilution of protection extends beyond the Aravallis. Courts and regulatory bodies increasingly approve projects based on assurances of mitigation rather than strict enforcement.
• Despite Common Cause vs Union of India (2017) clearly rejecting the legalisation of environmental violations after the fact, post-facto and conditional clearances have become routine.
• This erosion weakens the deterrent function of environmental law and signals that compliance is negotiable.

Mangroves, Coastal Ecology, and the Illusion of Compensation

• The consequences are especially visible in coastal ecosystems. Mangroves function as flood buffers, carbon sinks, and biodiversity reservoirs.
• Judicial approvals allowing the felling or transplantation of tens of thousands of mangrove trees for infrastructure represent a serious ecological setback.
• Reliance on compensatory afforestation ignores ecological science: mature mangrove ecosystems take decades to develop and cannot be recreated elsewhere.

Infrastructure in Fragile Ecosystems: The Char Dham Project

• A similar pattern emerges in the Himalayan region through the Char Dham highway project.
• A 2025 study identified 811 landslide-prone zones along the route, underscoring the fragility of the Himalayan ecosystem.
• Although ecological importance was acknowledged in Citizens for Green Doon vs Union of India (2021), wider roads were permitted on strategic grounds.
• Subsequent floods and disturbances raise serious questions about this balancing exercise, especially regarding intergenerational responsibility.

Procedural Inequality and Corporate Advantage

• Environmental governance increasingly favours economically powerful actors.
• Large corporations navigate clearance processes with ease, while public objections are marginalised and hearings curtailed.
• Environmental compliance becomes a checklist, undermining procedural fairness and public trust. This imbalance violates equality guarantees and entrenches perceptions of regulatory capture.

The Judiciary’s Changing Role and the Need for Institutional Reform

• Indian courts have historically been custodians of environmental rights.
• In M.C. Mehta vs Kamal Nath (1996), the Supreme Court affirmed the public trust doctrine, recognising natural resources as held by the state for the people.
• Departures from this jurisprudence necessitate reform, including regular sittings of the Supreme Court’s Green Bench and similar benches in High Courts.

Conclusion

• Ease of doing business must not become ease of environmental destruction.
• When law forgets what nature remembers, the Constitution risks standing mute before irreversible loss. Environmental harm is cyclical, cumulative, and unforgiving.
• Restoring environmental justice requires reaffirming constitutional duties, ecological science, and fairness, recognising development as a process constrained by environmental limits rather than a justification for their erosion.

About El Chichon Volcano:

• El Chichón, also known as Chichonal, is a stratovolcano in Mexico.
• This volcano is made up of several lava domes and a tuff ring.
  • A tuff ring is a low, wide ring of volcanic ash and rock.
• El Chichón sits between two larger volcanic areas: the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt and the Central America Volcanic Arc.

About Hakki Pikki Tribe:

• ‘Hakki-Pikki’ is one of the major tribal communities in Karnataka.
• In Kannada, the word ‘Hakki’ stands for ‘bird' and ‘Pikki’ stands for the verb ‘to catch’.
• Therefore, the community is known as the ‘bird catcher,’ which is their traditional occupation.
• They are recognized as a Scheduled Tribe in India.
• Language:
  • Despite being surrounded by Dravidian languages and living in southern India, the community speaks an Indo-Aryan language.
  • Their mother tongue was designated 'Vaagri' by scholars.
  • They communicate in 'Vaagri' at home but speak in Kannada when conducting daily business.
  • UNESCO has listed ‘Vaagri’ as one of the endangered languages.
• Rituals and Customs:
  • The tribe follows Hindu traditions and celebrates Hindu festivals.
  • They follow a clan-based social structure and practice endogamy within their clan.
  • The tribe prefers cross-cousin marriages.
  • The society is matriarchal, where the groom gives dowry to the bride’s family.

About Denotified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes (DNTs):

• Denotified Tribes (DNTs) are those communities which were once notified under the Criminal Tribes Acts, enforced by the British Raj between l871 and I947.
  • Once a tribe becomes “Notified” as criminal, all its members were required to register with the local magistrates, failing which they would be charged with a ‘crime’ under the Indian Penal Code.
• After Independence, this Act was repealed in 1952, and the communities were “denotified”, hence the name.
• The DNTs are among the most neglected, marginalised, and economically deprived communities, with most living a life of destitution.
• Historically, these communities never had access to private land or home ownership and used forests and grazing lands for their livelihood and residential use.

Status of DNTs in India:

• In India, roughly 10 percent of the population are DNTs.
• In 2014, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment constituted a National Commission for De-notified, Nomadic, and Semi-Nomadic Tribes (NCDNT) for a period of three years-
  • to prepare a state-wise list of castes belonging to DNTs  
  • to suggest appropriate measures in respect of Denotified and Nomadic Tribes that may be undertaken by the Central Government or the State Government.
• The Ministry constituted the Development and Welfare Board for Denotified, Nomadic, and Semi-Nomadic Communities (DWBDNCs) in 2019.
  • The Board has been mandated to formulate and implement welfare and development programmes for these communities.
• The Renke Commission (2008) was earlier commissioned to identify and list the DNT communities.

Scheme for Economic Empowerment of DNTs (SEED):

• It was launched by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment for the welfare of DNT communities.
• It is being implemented by DWBDNCs.
• Aim: To provide free competitive exam coaching, health insurance, housing assistance, and livelihood initiatives at the community level, and financial assistance for construction of houses will be provided to the members of DNTs Communities.

About Project Vault:

• It is launched by the United States to stockpile rare earths and critical minerals, aiming to shield American companies from global supply disruptions.
• It is a public-private partnership that will buy and store critical minerals and rare earth elements.
  • These minerals are used in products such as smartphones, batteries, jet engines, and electric vehicles.
• The project is similar to the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which stores emergency oil supplies. However, instead of crude oil, Project Vault will focus on minerals.

About Nalsarovar Bird Sanctuary:

• It is located in Gujarat.
• Nal Sarovar literally translates to ‘Tap Lake’.
• It is declared as a Ramsar site.
• Flora:
  • The common aquatic plants are Cyperus sp., Scirpus sp., Typha ungustata, Eleocharis palustris, Ruppia, Potamogeton, Vallisnaria, Naias, Chara, etc.
  • It also includes locally famous ‘pilu’ trees which harbor a red berry type edible fruit.
• Fauna:
  • It is home to various species of birds, including migratory birds that travel from places as far away as Europe and Siberia.
  • Apart from these, typical species like pelicans, ducks, herons, and storks can be found easily.

About SAMRIDH Programme:

• The Startup Accelerator of MeitY for Product Innovation, Development, and Growth (SAMRIDH) is a flagship programme of the Ministry of Electronics & IT (MeitY).
• Aim: It aims to support existing and upcoming Accelerators to select and accelerate potential IT-based startups to scale. 
• Among others, the program focuses on accelerating the startups by providing customer connect, investors connect and connect to international markets.
• Financial Support: It provides financial support to selected accelerators.
• Implementation: It is being implemented by MeitY Start-up Hub (MSH), Digital India Corporation (DIC).

About Yuva Sahakar Scheme:

• Yuva Sahakar Cooperative Enterprise Support and Innovation Scheme” aims to encourage newly formed cooperative societies with new and/or innovative ideas.
• It encourages young entrepreneur Cooperative Societies which are in operation for a minimum of 3 months.
• Loan facility: The loan provided under the scheme is a long-term loan (up to 5 years) and as an incentive, NCDC provides 2% interest subvention on its applicable rate of interest on term loan for the project activities.
• Implementation: It is being implemented by National Cooperative Development Corporation (NCDC) across the country.
• Features of Yuva Sahakar Scheme:
  • NCDC has produced a dedicated fund with liberal traits entitling youth to avail the scheme.
  • It provides more incentives to the cooperatives working in the North-Eastern region and the aspirational districts.
  • Exclusive benefits are provided for women, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe candidates.