No longer trying to ‘avoid World War III,’ Biden floats nuclear arms race
After allowing Ukrainian strikes on Russia with US weapons, the Biden administration threatens a nuclear weapons upgrade.
When President Biden authorized Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory with US weapons late last month, the White House insisted that the strikes would be limited. According to the New York Times’ David E. Sanger, administration officials described Biden’s move as “a narrow exemption to his 27-month-long insistence that American weapons can never be shot into Russian territory... a rule he established at the outset of the war in Ukraine to ‘avoid World War III.’”
Yet as is often the case when rules are broken, Biden’s “narrow exemption” to avoiding World War III is already creating new openings.
The White House decreed that Ukraine will only use American weaponry to strike Russian military positions in a short area across the border from Kharkiv. Yet just days after this policy was unveiled, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that the US could “adapt and adjust” and permit a wider range of targets deeper inside of Russia.
Blinken’s comments were followed by an even more dangerous potential “exemption.” On Friday, the White House’s top arms control official announced that in response to perceived threats from China and Russia, the US might abandon existing arms control limits and build more nuclear weapons.
“Absent a change in adversary arsenals, we may reach a point in the coming years where an increase from current deployed numbers is required. We need to be fully prepared to execute if the president makes that decision,” Pranay Vaddi told the Arms Control Association. “If that day comes, it will result in a determination that more nuclear weapons are required to deter our adversaries and protect the American people and our allies and partners.”
Vaddi’s warning was a stark departure from National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s comments before the same gathering one year prior. “The United States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them,” Sullivan said.
According to the New York Times, White House officials describe this potential “epochal shift” as “the inevitable outgrowth... of China’s rapid nuclear expansion and Russia’s repeated threats to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.”
In reality, Russia has only reiterated its standard doctrine that nuclear “use is possible in an exceptional case — in the event of a threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country,” as President Vladimir Putin explained this week. When it comes to Ukraine, he added, “I don’t think that such a case has come.” And while China has indeed pursued nuclear expansion, it has also lobbied other states to adopt its policy of “no first use” – a pledge that the US refuses to make.
Rather than see its threatened nuclear arms race as a response to aggressive “adversaries,” another interpretation is that the White House is seeking to protect its hegemony as a result of its weakening position in Ukraine. When it comes to risking nuclear escalation, Biden and his team have been more than willing to roll the dice going back a decade.
In 2014, Biden was the top proponent of President Obama’s unprecedented $1 trillion “modernization” of the US nuclear arsenal. Obama’s nuclear spending spree was a stark turnaround from his first year in office, when he had affirmed “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” One of Obama’s first advisers on nuclear policy blamed the crisis in Ukraine, specifically Russia’s annexation of Crimea. “The most fundamental game changer is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” Gary Samore said. “That has made any measure to reduce the stockpile unilaterally politically impossible.”
US officials claimed that Obama’s nuclear upgrade was not part of a new Cold War with Russia, but a routine improvement of existing capabilities. “The Cold War playbook,” Defense Secretary Ashton Carter insisted, “is not suitable for the 21st century.” Yet the administration’s 2017 Pentagon budget request admitted that Obama’s nuclear upgrade indeed derived from the Cold War playbook. “We are countering Russia’s aggressive policies through investments in a broad range of capabilities,” including via an effort to “modernize our nuclear arsenal,” the document stated.
Obama’s nuclear upgrade was “a technically sophisticated effort to ready US nuclear forces for a direct confrontation with Russia,” former Pentagon adviser Theodore Postol wrote at the time, “a reckless policy that directly undermines our safety and national security.”
In 2018, Putin unveiled Russia’s response in the form of its own nuclear upgrade. Russia’s new hypersonic missiles, the Kremlin leader bragged, could hit any US city unimpeded. To underscore his point, Putin presented an animated video showing a Russian Sarmat missile striking Florida. Chiding the US for its decision to “escalate the arms race for the past 15 years,” Putin said: “You didn’t listen to our country then. Listen to us now.”
When it comes to Biden’s current loosening approach to avoiding World War III, Putin has responded to the White House’s latest moves up the escalation ladder by signaling more dangerous shifts.
In public statements this week, Putin floated the possibility of deploying long-range missiles near the states that have given Ukraine similar weapons to strike Russia. “If we see that these countries are being drawn into a war against the Russian Federation, then we reserve the right to act in the same way,” Putin said. “In general, this is a path to very serious problems.” Moscow, he added days later, has “the right to send our weapons of the same class to those regions of the world where strikes can be made on sensitive facilities of the countries that do this against Russia.”
While floating these escalatory moves, Putin nonetheless reiterated his calls for diplomacy, which, he said, would be based on the thwarted Russia-Ukraine peace talks of April 2022. “Russia is ready for negotiations regarding Ukraine, but not on the basis of someone's fiction but on the basis of the Istanbul agreements and taking into account the new realities,” Putin said.
By “new realities”, Putin is apparently referring to the Ukrainian territory that Russia has seized and formally annexed since the Istanbul talks collapsed under Western pressure. Whatever he has in mind, the White House clearly has no interest in testing the waters. After moving closer to direct confrontation with Moscow by escalating the role of US weaponry in Ukraine, the Biden administration has decided that avoiding a new nuclear arms race is another rule that could be worth breaking.