In March, President Joe Biden approved a top-secret nuclear strategic plan for the United States, which for the first time reorients America’s deterrence strategy to focus on China’s rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal.
The change comes as the Pentagon believes China’s stockpiles will rival those of the United States and Russia in size and diversity over the next decade.
The White House never indicated that Biden had approved the revised strategy, called “Nuclear Employment Guidance,” which also recently sought to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from China, Russia and North Korea. The document, which is updated about every four years, is so highly classified that there are no electronic copies of it, only a small number of paper copies distributed to a few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.
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But in recent speeches, two senior administration officials were allowed to hint at the change — in carefully limited, single sentences — ahead of a more detailed, unclassified announcement to Congress expected before Biden leaves office.
“The president recently issued updated nuclear employment guidelines to account for multiple nuclear adversaries,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology nuclear strategist Vipin Narang, who served at the Pentagon, said this month before returning to academia. “And in particular,” he added, arms controls explained the “significant growth and diversity” of China’s nuclear arsenal.
In June, Pranay Vaddi, director of arms control and nonproliferation at the National Security Council, also pointed to a document that is the first to examine in detail whether the United States is prepared to respond to simultaneous or sequential nuclear crises. a combination of nuclear and other weapons.
The new strategy emphasizes “the need to intimidate Russia, China and North Korea at the same time,” Vaddi said, using an acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
In the past, the likelihood that American adversaries could coordinate nuclear threats to bypass the United States’ nuclear arsenal seemed remote. But the emerging partnership between Russia and China, as well as North Korea and Iran providing Russia with conventional weapons for the war in Ukraine, have fundamentally changed Washington’s thinking.
Russia and China are already organizing military exercises together. Intelligence agencies are trying to determine whether Russia supports North Korea’s and Iran’s missile programs in return.
The new document is a stark reminder that whoever takes the oath of office next January 20 will face a changed and far more volatile nuclear landscape than the one that existed just three years ago. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, including during the crisis in October 2022, when Biden and his aides, watching discussions between senior Russian commanders, feared the use of nuclear weapons would rise to 50. % or even more.
Biden, together with the leaders of Germany and Britain, made China and India public that the use of nuclear weapons had no role in Ukraine, and the crisis subsided, at least temporarily.
“It was an important moment,” Richard N. Haass, a former senior State Department and National Security Council official under several Republican presidents and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview. “We are dealing with a radicalized Russia; The idea that nuclear weapons would not be used in a conventional conflict is no longer a safe assumption.
Another major change is due to China’s nuclear ambitions. The country’s nuclear expansion is moving even faster than American intelligence officials expected two years ago, as President Xi Jinping’s determination to abandon a decades-long strategy of maintaining “minimal deterrence” reaches or surpasses the size of the United States. Russian arsenals. China’s nuclear center is now the fastest growing in the world.
While former President Donald Trump confidently predicted that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would give up his nuclear weapons after their three in-person meetings, the opposite happened. Kim has doubled in size and now has more than 60 weapons, officials estimate, and fuel for many more.
That expansion has changed the nature of North Korea’s challenge: With only a handful of weapons, the country could be thwarted by missile defenses. But its expanded arsenal is fast approaching the size of Pakistan and Israel, and is large enough that it could theoretically coordinate threats with Russia and China.
According to officials, it was only a matter of time before a completely different nuclear environment began to change US war planning and strategy.
“It is our responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we wished or hoped it would be,” Narang said as he left the Pentagon. “It’s possible that one day we’ll look back and see the quarter century as a post-Cold War nuclear standoff.”
The new challenge is “a real opportunity for cooperation and even covert cooperation between our nuclear adversaries,” he said.
So far, the new challenges of the US nuclear strategy have not been a topic of discussion in the presidential election campaign. Biden, who spent much of his political career as a non-proliferation advocate, has never spoken publicly in detail about how he would respond to the challenges of deterring the expanded forces of China and North Korea. Neither is Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic Party’s nominee.
At his last news conference in July, just days before he announced he would not seek a second term as the Democratic nominee, Biden acknowledged that he had adopted a policy of seeking ways to address the broader Sino-Russian partnership.
“Yes, but I’m not ready to talk about the details publicly,” Biden said. He did not indicate – and was not asked – how this partnership changed US nuclear strategy.
Since Harry Truman’s presidency, this strategy has overwhelmingly focused on the Kremlin’s arsenal. Biden’s new guidelines suggest how quickly that is changing.
China was mentioned in the latest nuclear guidance issued at the end of the Trump administration, according to an unclassified report submitted to Congress in 2020. But that was before Xi’s goals were understood.
Biden’s strategy sharpens that focus to match the Pentagon’s estimate that China’s nuclear forces will grow to 1,000 by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035. In fact, China is now showing up ahead of that schedule, officials say, and has begun loading nuclear missiles at new silo sites detected by commercial satellites three years ago.
China is another concern: it has now suspended short-term talks with the United States on improving nuclear security — for example, by agreeing to warn each other of threatening missile tests or establishing hotlines or other means of communication. to ensure that incidents or accidents do not escalate into nuclear incidents.
One conversation between the two countries took place late last fall, just before Biden and Xi met in California to try to mend relations between the two countries. They referred to those talks in a joint statement, but by then the Chinese had already signaled they were not interested in further talks, and earlier this summer said the talks had ended. They pointed to American arms sales to Taiwan that were underway long before the nuclear security talks began.
Mallory Stewart, the State Department’s assistant secretary for arms control, deterrence and stability, said in an interview that the Chinese government is “actively preventing us from discussing the risks.”
Instead, he said, Beijing “seems to be taking a page out of Russia’s playbook that until we address the tensions and challenges in our bilateral relationship, they will choose not to continue our discussions on arms control, risk reduction and nuclear non-proliferation.”
He argued that it was in China’s interest to “prevent these risks of mistakes and misunderstandings”.
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