WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama rode into office in 2009 with promises to work toward a nuclear-free world. His vow helped win him the Nobel Peace Prize that year. FILE PHOTO – Democratic US presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) meets with his foreign policy panel of former U.S. officials including former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (2nd R) and former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry (R) at a hotel in Washington June 18, 2008. REUTERS/Jim Bourg/File Photo The next year, while warning that Washington would retain the ability to retaliate against a nuclear strike, he promised that America would develop no new types of atomic weapons. Within 16 months of his inauguration, the United States and Russia negotiated the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as New START, meant to build trust and cut the risk of nuclear war. It limited each side to what the treaty counts as 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads. By the time Obama left office in January 2017, the risk of Armageddon hadn’t receded. Instead, Washington was well along in a modernization program that is making nearly all of its nuclear weapons more accurate and deadly. And Russia was doing the same:…