US isn’t ready for nuclear rivalry with China, Russia

As vice president in January 2017, Joe Biden gave a speech endorsing the idea of a “world without nuclear weapons.” Last year, he took office pledging to reduce America’s reliance on those weapons — perhaps with a promise that Washington would never use nuclear weapons first in a conflict, or perhaps by cutting, even eliminating, the country’s intercontinental ballistic missile force.
Biden’s first year has been a reality check. The threat of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe has reminded American allies of the role that US nuclear weapons might play in their defense. Thanks to a dramatic Chinese nuclear buildup, America will soon confront a nuclear peer in the Pacific. North Korea keeps expanding its arsenal. Some American allies in Europe and Asia have lobbied against a no-first-use pledge or cuts in the US arsenal.
Biden may want a future in which nuclear weapons fade into irrelevance, but that simply isn’t where the world is headed. The US is facing a new nuclear age: an era of fierce, multisided competition, one that is both reminiscent of and far more complex than the Cold War. It has only begun to grapple, strategically and intellectually, with this challenge.
The US does have lots of experience with nuclear statecraft. During the Cold War, US conventional forces were mostly outmatched in Europe and other key theaters. The threat of nuclear escalation was the ultimate guarantee of the free world’s security, and the nuclear balance shaped risk-taking and decision-making on both sides of the East-West divide.
The US became so militarily dominant that it hardly needed nuclear weapons. Dangers persisted, but they were primarily posed by nuclear terrorism, loose nukes and the weapons programs of relatively weak states such as North Korea.
The post-Cold War era saw continuing reductions in the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal, often codified in agreements with Russia. In 2009, President Barack Obama called for the eventual abolition of the weapons; he flirted with a no-first-use declaration, even as he approved a costly modernisation of America’s existing forces.
There was also an intellectual drawdown, as nuclear strategy went out of style. Ambitious policy wonks and military officers gravitated towards other issues. America’s strategic nuclear arsenal was so far from mind that the 2002 National Security Strategy contained no mention of it at all.
Biden’s speech in January 2017 captured the residual optimism of an era in which great-power nuclear competition seemed like an anachronism. By that point, however, a new nuclear age had already begun.
Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia reversed the nuclear atrophy of the post-Soviet era. As part of a years-long modernisation program, Putin’s regime drastically upgraded most of its nuclear missile forces. It invested in “non-strategic” nuclear weapons — torpedoes, short-range missiles and others — and is experimenting with exotic capabilities such as autonomous underwater vehicles and nuclear-powered cruise missiles.
China is now building a more secure and sophisticated “nuclear triad” — a combination of nuclear-capable bombers, ground-based intercontinental missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Its ICBM force is expanding rapidly. The Pentagon predicts that China will have more than 1,000
deliverable warheads by 2030 — an arsenal worthy of a superpower.
The return of great-power competition has brought with it the return of nuclear rivalry. Meanwhile, conventional weakness is making nuclear weapons even more important to US strategy.
Nukes would also loom large in a conflict between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Moscow can conquer territory in Eastern Europe, but it probably can’t win a long war against Nato. The scenario that worries American planners is known as “escalate to de-escalate”: In essence, Russia grabs some land and then threatens to use nuclear weapons, or perhaps even fires a warning shot, to compel Nato to make peace on Putin’s terms.
Biden is now facing the same problems. Nuclear weapons are becoming more, rather than less, important; the scope for responsible reductions in the size or role of America’s arsenal is shrinking fast. Yet the dilemmas surrounding nuclear statecraft are as vexing as ever.
In 2021, Biden and Putin renewed for five years the last significant US-Russian arms control agreement — New Start — and initiated a new “strategic stability dialogue.” Yet it is becoming harder to justify arms control treaties that bind the US and Russia but not China, and so far no one has found the formula for making Beijing play ball.
The importance of nuclear weapons is so great because the consequences of their use would be so profound. The dilemmas surrounding nuclear strategy are so sharp because US strategy requires making credible threats to deliver — and perhaps suffer — incredible destruction. Old questions of deterrence, warfighting and stability are taking on new and complex forms. To successfully handle the challenges of the new nuclear age, America will need all the intellectual firepower it can get.
—Bloomberg

Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute