Nuclear race adds new major power
Every president since the end of the Cold War has published a review of the U.S. approach to nuclear weapons: their purpose, scope and prospects. President Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review, completed some time ago but declassified late last month, forecasts dark clouds on the horizon. What was a competition between two nuclear superpowers, the United States vs. the Soviet Union and then Russia, is growing to three.
The newcomer is China, whose President Xi Jinping had his first inperson meeting with President Biden on Monday. Other nations have joined the atomic club — there are now nine — but China’s ambitions put it in the first rank. “By the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries,” the report says. In more than a bit of understatement, it adds: “This will create new stresses on stability and new challenges for deterrence, assurance, arms control, and risk reduction.”
Both the United States and Russia have deployed 1,550 nuclear warheads on strategic or long-range delivery vehicles. This was allowed under the 2010 New START accord, the last of the major arms control treaties still in force, which expires in 2026. China, which for many years kept a nuclear arsenal in the low hundreds of warheads, now appears to be heading toward at least 1,000 by the end of this decade, and is building a land-sea-air triad of delivery vehicles similar to that of Russia and the United States. All three nations are also pushing ahead with weapons in other domains, including hypersonic glide vehicles and cyberweapons, and both the United States and Russia maintain short-range or tactical nuclear weapons that have never been covered by treaty.
For much of the Cold War nuclear age, the two superpowers accepted arms control treaty limits to preserve some kind of stability. But now the United States faces a duo of nuclear adversaries who might prove far less willing to sign up for new treaty limits. The Biden posture review notes that while there is substantial past experience with crisis management with Russia, Washington “has made little progress” with China, which has refused to engage in negotiations about its nuclear forces. The review adds that “the scope and pace” of China’s nuclear weapons expansion, “as well as its lack of transparency and growing military assertiveness, raise questions regarding its intentions, nuclear strategy and doctrine, and perceptions of strategic stability.”
This bodes ill for the years ahead. Without arms control treaties, verification and crisis management channels, the United States might find itself in a dangerous three-way nuclear arms race with reduced visibility into Russian and Chinese nuclear forces. Such unbridled competition could bring with it the potential for miscalculation and misperception. President Vladimir Putin’s recent unsettling nuclear threats are just a taste of what might erupt in a broader arms race. The State Department confirmed Nov. 8 that the United States and Russia will soon return to talks about resuming inspections under the New START accord. That’s a promising sign, but a three-way nuclear arms control negotiation is still a long way off. It will require leaders to exert political willpower that is lacking at present.