Biden seeks less reliance on nukes for defense

WASHINGTON >> Democrat Joe Biden leaves little doubt that if elected he would try to scale back President Donald Trump’s buildup in nuclear weapons spending. And although the former vice president has not fully detailed his nuclear priorities, he says he would make the U.S. less reliant on the world’s deadliest weapons.

The two candidates’ views on nuclear weapons policy and strategy carry unusual significance in this election because the United States is at a turning point in deciding the future of its weapons arsenal and because of growing debate about the threat posed by Chinese and Russian nuclear advances.

China, whose relatively small nuclear force is growing in sophistication, is cited by the Pentagon’s top nuclear commander as a leading reason why the United States should go all out on nuclear modernization.

“We are going into a very different world,” Adm. Charles Richard, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, said Sept. 14. “We are on a trajectory, for the first time in our nation’s history, to face two peer nuclear-capable competitors.” He was referring to Russia, which has long been a nuclear peer, and China, whose leaders Richard says have put a strategic nuclear buildup “next on their todo list.”

Days later, Richard said China could become a peer “by the end of the decade, if not sooner.” But other estimates suggest a slower pace. The Pentagon recently said Beijing may double its nuclear stockpile over the next 10 years, which would still leave it far behind the U.S.

Trump entered the White House in 2017 with little to say on the subject of nuclear weapons, but his administration produced a policy document a year later that the Pentagon portrayed as largely tracking the path of the Obama administration. Trump did, however, add two weapon types and beef up the budget for a years-long overhaul of the nuclear arsenal — an overhaul that Biden sees as excessive.

“Our nuclear now is in the best shape it’s been in decades,” the president said this month, although the military says the arsenal’s main components are so old they are long past due for replacement. He has boasted in broad, sometimes cryptic, terms of U.S. nuclear advances, telling journalist Bob Woodward in 2019 that he had built a secret nuclear weapon that neither Russian nor China knew about.

If reelected, Trump would be expected to stay on his path of modernizing the nuclear arsenal, which has bipartisan support in Congress despite growing budget pressures. Less clear is how Trump would approach nuclear arms control, including the problem of North Korea’s unconstrained arsenal. His administration has walked away from one arms control deal with Russia and balked at extending an Obama-era strategic nuclear treaty with Russia that Biden says he would keep in place.

Just days before Trump entered the White House, then-Vice President Biden cautioned against abandoning Obama’s approach.