Why U.S. withdrawal from a 1987 nuclear treaty with Russia has some experts worried

The United States has officially withdrawn from a 1987 nuclear treaty with Russia, sparking increased fears of a new arms race on the horizon.

The Trump administration announced earlier this year that the U.S. would withdraw from the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which limited the development of ground-based missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers, CNN reports. At the time, the U.S. cited the fact that Russia is already not complying with the agreement, which Russia denies. On Friday, the U.S. formally withdrew.

"Russia is solely responsible for the treaty's demise," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg also said "we regret that Russia showed no willingness" to comply.

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The United States is already planning a test flight for a weapon that was banned under the treaty, The Associated Press reports. The announcement of the treaty's impending dissolution in February triggered some fears of an arms race that were re-upped on Friday.

The former State Department coordinator for threat reduction programs, for instance, told Vox that "we are opening up the possibility of a new arms race by destroying limitations set forth in the treaty," also calling this "another step backwards in our arms-control relations with Russia." With New START, another nuclear arms accord, also set to expire, "there would be no legally binding, verifiable limits on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals for the first time in nearly half a century," former State Department official Thomas Countryman told The Wall Street Journal.

Still, there's disagreement on this front, with Vox summing up the situation by writing, "experts argue that Trump has either pulled off a geopolitical masterstroke or has doomed humanity."

Stoltenberg said that NATO "does not want an arms race," BBC News reports, but United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had previously said that getting rid of the treaty means the loss of "an invaluable brake on nuclear war."