[Editor’s note: This article is based on testimony the authors gave to the Senate Armed Services Committee at a September 20 hearing on nuclear strategy and policy.]
The United States faces the most complex configuration of nuclear weapons issues since the dawn of the nuclear age. The most important new factor is the potential for the United States to simultaneously face two nuclear powers close to it. Unlike the Cold War, in which the United States primarily focused on nuclear competition with the Soviet Union, today it faces trilateral nuclear competition with both Russia and China. This situation is unprecedented.
China’s nuclear arsenal is expanding rapidly. Commander of the Strategic Command, Adm. Charles Richards, described the growth of China’s arsenal as “staggering” and former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Hyten called it “unprecedented”. For many years, China was thought to maintain an arsenal of around 200 nuclear warheads. That estimate has since risen to about 350, and could expand to 1,000 or more by 2030. As it acquires more warheads, the People’s Liberation Army is also developing a full nuclear triad much sooner than most observers expected, as well as capabilities that could call “strategic stability” called into question. In addition to China’s first air-launched bomber and its first credible nuclear deterrent at sea, last year’s test of what appears to be a fractional orbital bombardment system raises the prospect of a short or no-warning strike — a highly destabilizing development.
Russia, of course, remains the only existential challenge to the United States today because of the size of its nuclear arsenal. Russia’s nuclear forces have undergone major modernization over the past 15 years, and those efforts continue. Russia, of course, also maintains a large stockpile of theater nuclear weapons – perhaps 10 times the number of similar weapons in the US inventory. In 2018, President Putin announced several exotic nuclear weapons including “a new heavy intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM); nuclear-armed hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV); an air-launched hypersonic missile with a nuclear weapon; nuclear-powered cruise missile and nuclear weapons; and a nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarine drone.” The precise purpose of these new weapons remains unclear, and some of them appear to reflect the pursuit of capabilities the US has deemed too dangerous to develop. Nonetheless, they create additional uncertainty about “strategic stability” and must be addressed if any subsequent New START agreement is to be reached.
The role of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, hypersonics, and cyber capabilities may complicate nuclear deterrence in ways we are only beginning to understand. Cyber intrusions into nuclear command and control systems, for example, could undermine the assumptions that underpin our concepts of nuclear deterrence such as an assured second-strike retaliatory capability. Such technologies, combined with fractional orbital bombardment systems or other maneuverable hypersonic weapons, could provide states with a “beheading” option that would force governments to adopt risky “launch-on-warning” postures, which increases the possibility of human error and error.
As if the above challenges weren’t enough, American policymakers and strategists will have to contend with the prospect of China and Russia maintaining close cooperation and perhaps even working to create an alliance. These kinds of questions will require the kind of sustained intellectual effort that we undertook in the Cold War but largely abandoned after 1992.
America’s treaty allies continue to rely heavily on US nuclear guarantees—hence the universal opposition from our NATO and Asian allies to the Biden administration’s consideration of adopting a “no-first-use” police in its nuclear posture review. Separating the United States from its allies remains a clear goal of both Russia and China. As long as the US hopes to retain one of its most important comparative strategic advantages, its allies, in the long-term competition with Moscow and Beijing, it must assure allies that we will defend them against conventional and nuclear aggression. A credible threat of nuclear retaliation against an aggressor will necessarily remain part of the equation.
What should be done there? First, we must continue to modernize all three parts of the nuclear triad—a necessity the Senate recognized when it made modernization a condition of its ratification of the New Beginnings Treaty in 2010. U.S. nuclear forces must remain robust, redundant, survivable, responsive, controllable, visible, and capable of penetrating enemy defenses to keep their valuable assets, including their forces, leadership and their war-supporting industries, at risk if it remains a credible deterrent. The ability to absorb a first strike and retaliate against an aggressor while maintaining sufficient forces in reserve to deter another close partner will likely require a greater number of deployed warheads in the future than New START allows. It also means continuing to modernize our nuclear command, control and communications backbone to ensure its robustness against low-level or no-warning attack threats.
We must be sensitive to both the strategic and nuclear capabilities of the theater. As Russia and China seek to stress and divide America’s alliances, just as they did in the Cold War, we cannot allow them to issue nuclear threats to deter American counter-intervention in Europe or the Indo-Pacific without the means to respond in kind.
Nuclear deterrence today faces very real and new challenges, but that doesn’t mean we need to start from scratch. Much of what the Cold War taught us about deterrence remains valid. We cannot allow our adversaries to dictate to us because they have a strategic or nuclear advantage. We must invest in deterrence—not just in our defense budget, but in the rhetoric of our top leaders and in the combined intellectual capacity of our defense establishment—because we cannot afford it.
