The plan also reportedly aims to prepare the US for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from China, Russia and North Korea.
In March, US President J. Biden approved a top-secret plan for the United States’ nuclear strategy, in which for the first time America’s deterrence strategy is reoriented towards China’s rapidly growing nuclear arsenal. The Pentagon believes that China’s stockpiles will match those of the United States and Russia in size and diversity within the next decade.
The White House never announced that Mr. Biden had approved the revised strategy, known as the “Nuclear Use Guidelines,” which also aims 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 tightly classified that no electronic copies are available, and only a few hard copies have been distributed to a few national security officials and Pentagon chiefs.
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 report to Congress expected before Biden leaves office.
“The president recently issued updated nuclear guidance to take into account adversaries with multiple nuclear weapons,” Vipin Narang, an MIT nuclear strategist who worked at the Pentagon, said earlier this month before returning to academia. He added that the weapons guidelines specifically took into account the “significantly increased size and diversity of China’s nuclear arsenal.”
In June, Pranay Vaddi, senior director of arms control and nonproliferation at the National Security Council, also referred to a paper that examined in detail for the first time whether the United States is prepared to respond to nuclear crises that occur simultaneously or sequentially, using a combination of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons.
Vaddi said the new strategy emphasized “the need to simultaneously deter Russia, the PRC and North Korea,” using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
Previously, the likelihood that America’s adversaries could coordinate nuclear threats to outsmart America’s nuclear arsenal seemed slim. But the emerging partnership between Russia and China and the conventional arms that North Korea and Iran are supplying to Russia for its war in Ukraine have fundamentally changed Washington’s thinking.
Russia and China are already holding joint military exercises. 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 January 20 next year will face a changed and far more volatile nuclear landscape than the one that existed just three years ago.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, including in 2022. in October crisis, when Mr. Biden and his aides, familiar with intercepted conversations of high Russian commanders, feared that the probability of using a nuclear weapon could increase to 50 percent. or even more.
Mr. Biden, together with the leaders of Germany and Great Britain, forced China and India to make public statements that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine was not important, and the crisis at least temporarily subsided.
“It was an important moment,” Richard N. Haas, a former senior State Department and National Security Council official who has worked for several Republican presidents and is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in an interview. – We are dealing with a radicalized Russia; the idea that atomic bombs will not be used in a conventional conflict is no longer a safe assumption.”
The second major development concerns China’s nuclear ambitions.
The country’s nuclear development is progressing even faster than American intelligence officials expected two years ago, as Chinese leader Xi Jinping moves to abandon a decades-long strategy of maintaining a “minimum deterrent” to match or exceed the size of Washington and Moscow’s arsenals. China’s nuclear complex 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 has happened. Kim Jong Un has doubled the number of weapons and, according to officials, now has more than 60 weapons and is developing more.
This development has changed the nature of North Korea’s challenge: when the country had few weapons, it could be deterred by its missile defenses. But its expanded arsenal is fast approaching the size of Pakistan’s and Israel’s, and is large enough to theoretically coordinate threats with Moscow and Beijing.
According to officials, it was only a matter of time before a fundamentally different nuclear environment began to change America’s war plans and strategy.
“It is our duty to see the world as it is, not as we expected or wanted to see it,” V. Narang said while leaving the Pentagon. “It’s possible that one day we’ll look back and see the quarter century after the Cold War as a nuclear hiatus.”
The new challenge is “the real possibility of cooperation and even collusion by our nuclear adversaries,” he said.
So far, new challenges to America’s nuclear strategy have not been a topic of discussion during the presidential campaign. Mr. Biden, who has spent much of his political career as a proponent of nuclear nonproliferation, has never publicly detailed how he responds to the challenges of deterring China and North Korea’s expanded forces. Neither did Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic nominee.
At his last press conference in July, days before announcing he would not seek the Democratic nomination for a second term, Mr. Biden acknowledged that he had entered politics to find ways to interfere with the broader China-Russia partnership.
“Yes, I do, but I’m not ready to talk publicly about the details,” Biden said. He did not mention — and was not asked — how the partnership changes America’s nuclear strategy.
Since the presidency of Harry Truman (1945-1953), this strategy has focused on the Kremlin’s arsenal. Biden’s new guidelines show how quickly that is changing.
According to an unclassified report submitted to Congress in 2020, China was mentioned in the final nuclear guidelines issued at the end of the Trump administration. But that was before the extent of Xi Jinping’s ambitions was realized.
In J. Biden’s strategy, this focus has been increased, taking into account the Pentagon’s calculations that China’s nuclear forces by 2030 will increase to 1,000, and by 2035 – up to 1,500, which is roughly the number currently deployed by the United States and Russia. Indeed, officials say Beijing is currently ahead of that schedule and has begun loading nuclear missiles into new bunkers spotted by commercial satellites three years ago.
Another concern for Beijing is that it has ended short-term talks with the United States on improving nuclear safety and security, such as agreeing to warn each other of impending missile tests or establishing hotlines or other means of communication to prevent incidents or accidents from escalating into nuclear collisions.
One of the discussions between the two countries took place at the end of last fall, just before Mr. Biden and Xi Jinping met in California, where they sought to restore relations between the two countries. They mentioned the talks in a joint statement, but at the time the Chinese had already indicated they were not interested in further discussions and earlier this summer said the talks were over. They pointed to American arms sales to Taiwan that took place long before 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 was “actively preventing us from talking about the risks.”
Beijing, she said, appears to be “taking a cue from Russia that until we resolve the tensions and challenges in our bilateral relationship, they will decide not to continue our talks on arms control, risk reduction and non-proliferation.”
It said it was in China’s interest to “prevent such risks of miscalculations and misunderstandings”.
For example “The New York Times” inf.
2024-08-22 02:41:28