President Joe Biden approved a top-secret nuclear strategic plan for the United States in March, marking the first time that U.S. deterrence strategy has focused on the rapid expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal.
This shift is happening because the Pentagon is convinced that China’s stockpiles will be as large and diverse as those of the United States and Russia over the next decade.
The White House never announced that Biden had approved the revised strategy, called the “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, updated roughly every four years, is so tightly classified that there are no electronic copies, only a small number of paper copies circulated among a few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.
Sign up for the New York Times morning newsletter
But in recent speeches, two senior administration officials were allowed to allude to the change — in carefully limited, few sentences — ahead of a more detailed, unclassified notice to Congress expected before Biden leaves office.
“The president recently issued an updated nuclear weapons guidance to account for multiple adversaries with nuclear weapons,” Vipin Narang, a nuclear strategist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who served in the Pentagon, said this month before returning to academia. “And in particular,” he added, the weapons guidance took into account “the significant increase in the size and diversity” of China’s nuclear arsenal.
In June, Pranay Vaddi, the National Security Council’s senior director for arms control and nonproliferation, also referred to the document. It is the first to examine in detail whether the United States is prepared to respond to nuclear crises that occur simultaneously or sequentially with a combination of nuclear and nonnuclear weapons.
The new strategy emphasizes “the need to deter Russia, the People’s Republic of China and North Korea simultaneously,” said Vaddi, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
In the past, it seemed unlikely that U.S. adversaries could coordinate nuclear threats to outmaneuver the U.S. nuclear arsenal. But the emerging partnership between Russia and China, and the conventional weapons that North Korea and Iran are supplying to Russia for the war in Ukraine, have fundamentally changed Washington’s thinking.
Russia and China have been conducting joint military exercises, and intelligence agencies are trying to determine whether Russia is supporting North Korea’s 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 just three years ago. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, including during a crisis in October 2022 when Biden and his aides, looking at intercepted conversations among senior Russian commanders, feared the likelihood of nuclear use could rise to 50% or higher.
Biden, along with leaders of Germany and Britain, got China and India to publicly declare that there was no role for nuclear weapons to be used in Ukraine. That ended the crisis, at least temporarily.
“It was a significant moment,” noted Richard N. Haass in an interview, a former senior State Department and National Security Council official for several Republican presidents, and the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “We’re dealing with a Russia that has been radicalized; the idea that nuclear weapons would not be used in a conventional conflict is no longer a safe assumption.”
The second major change stems from China’s nuclear ambitions. The country’s nuclear expansion is proceeding even faster than U.S. intelligence officials expected two years ago, driven by President Xi Jinping’s determination to scrap the decades-old strategy of maintaining a “minimum deterrent” to meet or exceed the size of U.S. and Russian arsenals. China’s nuclear complex is now the fastest-growing in the world.
Although former President Donald Trump confidently predicted that North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un would give up his nuclear weapons after their three face-to-face meetings, the opposite happened. 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 it had 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 it’s large enough to theoretically coordinate threats with Russia and China.
Officials said it was only a matter of time before a fundamentally different nuclear environment changed U.S. war plans and strategies.
“It is our responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we hoped or wished it would be,” Narang said as he left the Pentagon. “It is possible that one day we will look back and see the quarter century since the Cold War as a nuclear hiatus.”
The new challenge is “the real possibility of cooperation and even collusion between our nuclear-armed adversaries,” he said.
So far, the new challenges to U.S. nuclear strategy have not been a topic of debate in the presidential campaign. Biden, who has spent much of his political career as a proponent of nuclear nonproliferation, has never publicly discussed in detail how he will respond to the challenges of deterring the expanded forces of China and North Korea. And neither has Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic nominee.
At his last press conference in July, just days before announcing he would not seek the Democratic nomination for a second term, Biden acknowledged that he had adopted a policy of looking for ways to interfere with broader China-Russia cooperation.
“Yes, I do, but I’m not prepared to talk publicly about the details,” Biden said. He made no reference to — and was not asked about — how that partnership changed U.S. nuclear strategy.
Since Harry Truman’s presidency, that strategy has overwhelmingly focused on the Kremlin’s arsenal. Biden’s new directives show how quickly that is changing.
China was mentioned in the last nuclear guidelines, issued at the end of the Trump administration, according to an unclassified report provided to Congress in 2020. But that was before the scale of Xi’s ambitions was understood.
Biden’s strategy sharpens that focus to reflect Pentagon estimates that China’s nuclear force would expand to 1,000 by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035, roughly the numbers now deployed by the United States and Russia. In fact, China now appears to be ahead of that schedule, officials say, and has begun loading nuclear missiles at new silo fields spotted by commercial satellites three years ago.
There is another concern about China: the country has now halted a short-lived conversation with the United States about improving nuclear safety and security, such as by agreeing to warn each other of impending missile tests, or by setting up hotlines or other means of communication to ensure that incidents or accidents do not escalate into nuclear confrontations.
One conversation between the two countries took place late last fall, just before Biden and Xi met in California, where they tried to reset relations between the two countries. They referred to those talks in a joint statement, but by then the Chinese had already indicated that they were not interested in further talks, and earlier this summer they said the talks were over. They cited U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, which had been ongoing 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 “actively prevented us from having conversations about the risks.”
Instead, she said, Beijing appears to be “taking a page from the Russian playbook: unless 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.”
It was in China’s interest, she argued, “to avoid these risks of miscalculations and misunderstandings.”
c. 2024 The New York Times Company
