New York.- President Biden approved a highly classified nuclear strategic plan for the United States in March that, for the first time, reorients the American deterrence strategy to focus on the rapid expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal.
The shift comes as the Pentagon believes China’s arsenals will rival those of the United States and Russia in size and diversity within the next decade.
The White House stopped short of announcing that Biden had approved the revised strategy, dubbed “Nuclear Employment Guidance,” which also seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from China, Russia and North Korea. The document, which is updated roughly every four years, is so highly classified that no electronic copies exist, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a select few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.
But in recent speeches, two senior administration officials have been able to allude to the change — in sparse, carefully limited sentences — ahead of a more detailed, declassified notification to Congress that is expected before Biden leaves office.
Vipin Narang, a nuclear strategist at MIT who worked at the Pentagon, said earlier this month, before returning to academia: “The president recently released updated guidance on the employment of nuclear weapons to account for multiple nuclear-armed adversaries.” “And in particular,” he added, the weapons guidance explained “the significant increase in the size and diversity” of China’s nuclear arsenal.
In June, the National Security Council’s senior director for arms control and nonproliferation, Pranay Vaddi, also referred to the document, the first to examine in detail whether the United States is prepared to respond to nuclear crises that erupt simultaneously or sequentially, with a mix of nuclear and nonnuclear weapons.
According to Vaddi, the new strategy emphasizes “the need to simultaneously deter Russia, the People’s Republic of China and North Korea.”
In the past, the likelihood that American adversaries could coordinate nuclear threats to overwhelm the U.S. nuclear arsenal seemed remote. But the emerging partnership between Russia and China, and the conventional weapons that North Korea and Iran are providing to Russia for the war in Ukraine, have radically changed Washington’s thinking.
Russia and China are already conducting military exercises together. Intelligence agencies are trying to determine whether Russia is helping North Korea and Iran’s missile programs in return.
The new document is a stark reminder that whoever is sworn in on Jan. 20 will face a changed and far more volatile nuclear landscape than the one that existed just three years ago. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine, including during a crisis in October 2022, when Mr. Biden and his aides, in the face of intercepted conversations among senior Russian officials, feared that the likelihood of nuclear use could rise to 50 percent or even higher.
Mr. Biden, along with the leaders of Germany and Britain, got China and India to make public statements that there was no place for the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the crisis abated, at least temporarily.
“It was an important moment,” Richard N. Haass, a former senior official in the State Department and on the National Security Council under several Republican presidents and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview. “We are facing a radicalized Russia; the idea that nuclear weapons would not be used in a conventional conflict is no longer a safe assumption.”
The second big change stems from China’s nuclear ambitions. The country’s nuclear expansion is proceeding at an even faster pace than U.S. intelligence services anticipated two years ago, driven by President Xi Jinping’s determination to scrap the decades-old strategy of maintaining “minimum deterrence” to match or surpass the size of Washington’s and Moscow’s arsenals. China’s nuclear complex is now the world’s fastest-growing.
Although former President Donald J. Trump confidently predicted that Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, would surrender his nuclear weapons after their three in-person meetings, the opposite has occurred. Mr. Kim has doubled down, and now has more than 60 weapons, officials estimate, and the fuel for many more.
That expansion has changed the nature of North Korea’s challenge: When the country possessed only a handful of weapons, it could be deterred by missile defenses. But its expanded arsenal is fast approaching the size of Pakistan’s and Israel’s, and is large enough that it could, in theory, coordinate threats with Moscow and Beijing.
It was only a matter of time before a fundamentally different nuclear environment began to alter U.S. war plans and strategy, officials said.
“It is our responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we expected or hoped it would be,” Narang said as he left the Pentagon. “We may one day look back and see the quarter-century after the Cold War as a nuclear interim.”
The new challenge is “the real possibility of collaboration and even collusion among our nuclear-armed adversaries,” he said.
So far in the presidential campaign, new challenges to American nuclear strategy have not been a topic of debate. Mr. Biden, who spent much of his political career as an advocate of nuclear nonproliferation, has never spoken publicly in detail about how he is responding to the challenges of deterring China and North Korea from expanding their forces. Nor has Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic Party nominee.
At his final news conference in July, just days before announcing he would no longer seek the Democratic nomination for a second term, Biden acknowledged that he had adopted a policy of looking for ways to interfere in the broader China-Russia partnership.
“Yes, I do, but I’m not prepared to talk about the details publicly,” Biden said. He did not address – or was asked – how the partnership was altering U.S. nuclear strategy.
Since Harry Truman’s presidency, that strategy has focused overwhelmingly on the Kremlin’s arsenal. Biden’s new guidelines suggest how quickly that situation is changing.
China was mentioned in the latest nuclear guidance, issued at the end of the Trump administration, according to an unclassified account provided to Congress in 2020. But that was before the scope of Xi’s ambitions was understood.
Biden’s strategy fine-tunes that approach to reflect Pentagon estimates that China’s nuclear force would grow to 1,000 by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035 — roughly the number the United States and Russia now deploy. Indeed, Beijing appears to have moved ahead of that timetable, officials say, and has begun loading nuclear missiles into new silo fields that were spotted by commercial satellites three years ago.
Beijing is also a cause for concern: It has broken off brief talks with the United States on improving nuclear security, for example by agreeing to warn each other of impending missile tests or establishing hotlines or other means of communication to ensure that incidents or accidents do not escalate into nuclear encounters.
One of the talks between the two countries took place late last fall, just before Biden and Xi met in California, where they sought to repair relations between the two countries. They referred to those talks in a joint statement, but by then the Chinese had already hinted that they were not interested in further discussions, and earlier this summer they said the talks were over. They cited U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, which were underway long before the nuclear security talks began.
Mallory Stewart, the State Department’s undersecretary for Arms Control, Deterrence and Stability, said in an interview that the Chinese government was “actively preventing us from having conversations about the risks.”
Instead, he said, Beijing “appears to be taking a page from Russia’s playbook in that until we address the tensions and challenges in our bilateral relationship, they will choose not to continue our talks on arms control, risk reduction and nonproliferation.”
China has an interest, he argued, in “preventing these risks of miscalculation and misunderstanding.”
#Biden #approves #secret #nuclear #strategy #focused #Chinese #threat
