On Aug. 20, the New York Times reported that, in March, President Joe Biden ordered the Pentagon to get ready for coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea. It appears the administration is also willing to increase the number of deployed nuclear weapons.
The changes are incorporated in the Nuclear Employment Guidance, a highly classified document.
The administration has hinted at the significant shift in policy but has made no formal announcement. Public comments this year from the former acting assistant secretary of Defense for space policy, Vipin Narang, shortly before leaving his Pentagon post, and the National Security Council’s Pranay Vaddi referred obliquely to the new policy guidance.
A fresh approach to nuclear weapons is long overdue. A November 2022 Pentagon report forecast that China would quadruple the number of such weapons from about 400 then to 1,500 by 2035. These estimates look far too low, especially because independent analysts have come up with higher figures. At the top end is Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, who looks at the rapid increase in delivery platforms, such as missiles and subs. His number is 7,000 weapons by 2035.
“That figure would be consistent with their requirements of obtaining global hegemony and complete domination of the United States and all other democracies,” he told me in June.
Whatever the warhead count, most agreed with former Adm. Charles Richard, when as commander of U.S. Strategic Command in 2021 he said “We are witnessing a strategic breakout by China.” That year, observers saw that China, in three separate fields in the northern part of the country, was building perhaps as many as 360 missile silos.
The silos appear designed to take the DF-41 missile, which has a maximum range of 9,300 miles — putting all America in reach from the three fields — and can carry 10 warheads apiece. Of course, China’s military could decide to not fill all the silos, but the strategic direction is clear.
Biden has longstanding views against the use of such weapons. “I believe that the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring — and, if necessary, retaliating against — a nuclear attack,” he wrote in 2020 in Foreign Affairs.
For a long time, America’s arms control community has wanted the U.S. to declare it will never use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. Many, therefore had expected Biden to announce the U.S. would no longer defend its allies with nukes, a radical departure in doctrine. American willingness to launch these weapons during the Cold War helped to prevent superior conventional Soviet forces from attacking Western Europe.
American allies, the Financial Times reported in 2021, were deeply concerned about Biden’s contemplated change in policy. Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Australia — all U.S. treaty partners — intensively lobbied the Biden administration not to change policy.
A senior congressional source told the Financial Times: “Allies are essentially, in unison, collectively panicking.”
In any event, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons to prevent countries from coming to Ukraine’s aid — convinced Biden to not adopt the sole purpose doctrine when he issued his Nuclear Posture Review in October 2022.
The New York Times report is stunning, therefore, because it suggests that Biden has changed deep-seated views.
In the wake of the Times piece, the Biden administration has tried to downplay the report. “There is far more continuity than change,” Sean Savett, White House spokesperson, told reporters about the Nuclear Employment Guidance.
Peter Huessy of the National Institute for Deterrence Studies told me the administration “is unofficially telling us the shift in policy in the document is no big deal — presumably not to upset the disarmament and arms control community before the election — but the Chinese are upset because they know the changes are critically important.”
“The nuclear business is deadly serious, so any change in policy, no matter how subtly stated, is significant,” Huessy added. “The new emphasis on China in the Nuclear Employment Guidance means, as a practical matter, that the U.S. will be targeting more Chinese sites. Yet because we are limited by New START to only so many deployed warheads, we may have to abandon targets in other countries. That will erode deterrence.”
The obvious solution is to either withdraw from the New START treaty, which binds only the United States and Russia, or not renew the treaty when it expires in February 2026.
Whatever one thinks of arms control, it is dangerous for America to limit the size of its deployed arsenal when China, among others, has made no similar commitment, and Xi Jinping and Putin are coordinating both their military moves and their policies, many of which are directed against America.
A confident (possibly oblivious) U.S. has not thought in clear terms about nuclear weapons for a long time. Now, American policymakers are scrambling to respond to a China that is fast building its arsenal. A Pentagon-funded study, released this month, concluded that the U.S. is “ill-equipped” to deal with Chinese nuclear escalation moves.
“We will continue to focus our efforts on reducing nuclear risk by enhancing deterrence and our preference for resolving differences through arms control diplomacy,” Savett said.
“Arms control diplomacy?”
Beijing this year has talked with the Biden administration about nuclear weapons, but the discussions have been short and unproductive. Last month, Beijing suspended nuclear talks with Washington.
Biden’s new Nuclear Employment Guidance, despite all the hopeful explanations afterward, suggests that the era of arms control is fast ending.
Welcome to the world’s next arms race.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of “The Coming Collapse of China” and the upcoming “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America.” Follow him on X @GordonGChang.
