On Monday, November 17, our Oppenheimer Fellow Lucas Ruiz published an essay in The American Conservative arguing for President Donald Trump to accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer to voluntarily extend the New START treaty for an additional year beyond its February 2026 expiration date. This extension would maintain the existing cap on the number of deployed nuclear weapons at ~1,550 warheads for Russia and the United States respectively.
Lucas Ruiz
Oppenheimer Fellow
Lucas is the inaugural Oppenheimer Fellow with the Oppenheimer Project, where he works on trilateral strategic engagement between the United States, Russia and China on foreign and nuclear policy. Previously, he was the Fall 2024 Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center. There, he worked on the Reimagining U.S. Diplomacy and Effective Defense Policy projects. His research interests are U.S. global power and nuclear weapons policy. Ruiz has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Inkstick Media, The National Interest, Responsible Statecraft and through the Stimson Center, and has featured as a podcast guest. He earned his B.A. in History from the University of Connecticut.