Biden Approves Secret Nuclear Strategy That Refocuses on China

United States – The New York Times revealed today, Wednesday, that US President Joe Biden approved last March a highly secret nuclear strategy plan that redirects, for the first time, the US deterrent strategy towards China’s efforts to expand its nuclear arsenal.

The newspaper reported that the White House never announced that Biden had approved the revised version of the strategy, called the “Guidelines for the Use of Nuclear Weapons,” noting that an unclassified notification about the revised version is expected to be sent to Congress before Biden leaves office.

The newspaper said that two senior officials in the US administration were allowed to hint at the strategy review during their recent speeches, noting that the strategy is updated every four years or so, and is so secret that there are no electronic copies of it, but a few paper copies are distributed to a limited number of national security officials and leaders of the US Department of Defense (the Pentagon).

But in recent speeches, senior administration officials have been allowed to allude to the change — in single, tight sentences — before notifying Congress of unclassified details expected to come before Biden leaves office.

The change comes at a time when the Pentagon believes that China’s stockpiles will rival the size and diversity of those of the United States and Russia over the next decade.

In this context, Vipin Narang, a nuclear strategist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that President Biden recently issued updated guidance for the use of nuclear weapons to take into account multiple nuclear adversaries. He added that the new nuclear weapons guidance took into account the “significant increase in the size and diversity” of China’s nuclear arsenal.

Last June, the National Security Council’s senior director for arms control and nonproliferation, Bernay Fadde, outlined the document, which for the first time examines in detail whether the United States is prepared to respond to nuclear crises that could erupt simultaneously or sequentially, using a mix of nuclear and nonnuclear weapons.

The new strategy emphasizes “the need to deter Russia, China and North Korea simultaneously,” Fadi said.

In the past, the possibility that America’s adversaries and rivals would coordinate nuclear threats to overwhelm the U.S. nuclear arsenal seemed remote. But the emerging partnership between Russia and China, and the conventional weapons that North Korea and Iran are providing to Russia in its war in Ukraine, have radically changed Washington’s thinking.

Russia and China are conducting joint military exercises, and 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 the new US president, who will be inaugurated on January 20, will face a dramatically changed and more volatile nuclear landscape than the one that existed 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 advisers, based on intercepts of conversations between senior Russian leaders, felt the likelihood of nuclear weapons use could rise to 50 percent or more.

Trump confidently predicted that North Korea’s leader would give up his nuclear weapons, but the opposite happened

Although former President Donald Trump confidently predicted that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would give up his nuclear weapons after their three personal meetings, the opposite has happened. Kim has doubled down on his expansion, and now has more than 60 weapons, officials estimate, plus enough fuel for many more.

This expansion has changed the nature of the North Korean challenge. When the country had few weapons, it could be deterred by missile defenses, but its expanding arsenal is rapidly approaching the size of those of Pakistan and Israel, and is large enough to coordinate threats with Moscow and Beijing.

Biden, who has spent much of his political career as an advocate for nuclear nonproliferation, has not spoken publicly about how he would address the challenges of deterring expanding forces in China and North Korea. Nor has Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, vice president.

At his last news conference in July, just days before announcing that he would not seek a second term as Democratic presidential nominee, Biden acknowledged that he had adopted a policy that sought to interfere with the broader China-Russia partnership. He did not suggest that that partnership had changed U.S. nuclear strategy.

Since Harry Truman’s presidency, this strategy has been largely focused on the Kremlin’s arsenal, and Biden’s new directives show how quickly that is changing.

China was mentioned in the latest nuclear directive, issued at the end of the Trump administration, according to an unclassified report submitted to Congress in 2020.

Biden’s strategy clarifies the focus to reflect Pentagon estimates that China’s nuclear force will expand to 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, and 1,500 by 2035, figures currently published by the United States and Russia.

In fact, Beijing now appears to be ahead of that timeline, and has begun loading up nuclear missiles.

Source: New York Times