Biden Approved Secret Nuclear Strategy Refocusing on Chinese Threat
In
a classified document approved in March, the president ordered U.S.
forces to prepare for possible coordinated nuclear confrontations with
Russia, China and North Korea.
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President
Biden spent much of his political career as an advocate of nuclear
nonproliferation and reducing the role of nuclear weapons in American
defenses.Eric Lee/The New York Times
David E. Sanger has written about American nuclear strategy for The New York Times for nearly four decades.
Aug. 20, 2024Updated 4:08 p.m. ET
President
Biden approved in March a highly classified nuclear strategic plan for
the United States that, for the first time, reorients America’s
deterrent strategy to focus on China’s rapid expansion in its nuclear
arsenal.
The
shift comes as the Pentagon believes China’s stockpiles will rival the
size and diversity of the United States’ and Russia’s over the next
decade.
The
White House never announced that Mr. Biden had approved the revised
strategy, called the “Nuclear Employment Guidance,” which also newly
seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear
challenges from China, Russia and North Korea. The document, updated
every four years or so, is so highly classified that there are no
electronic copies, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a
few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.
But
in recent speeches, two senior administration officials were allowed to
allude to the change — in carefully constrained, single sentences —
ahead of a more detailed, unclassified notification to Congress expected
before Mr. Biden leaves office.
“The
president recently issued updated nuclear-weapons employment guidance
to account for multiple nuclear-armed adversaries,” Vipin Narang, an
M.I.T. nuclear strategist who served in the Pentagon, said earlier this month before
returning to academia. “And in particular,” he added, the weapons
guidance accounted for “the significant increase in the size and
diversity” of China’s nuclear arsenal.
In June, the National Security Council’s senior director for arms control and nonproliferation, Pranay Vaddi, also referred to the document,
the first to examine in detail whether the United States is prepared to
respond to nuclear crises that break out simultaneously or
sequentially, with a combination of nuclear and nonnuclear weapons.
The
new strategy, Mr. Vaddi said, emphasizes “the need to deter Russia, the
PRC and North Korea simultaneously,” using the acronym for the People’s
Republic of China.
In
the past, the likelihood that American adversaries could coordinate
nuclear threats to outmaneuver the American nuclear arsenal seemed
remote. But the emerging partnership between Russia and China, and the
conventional arms North Korea and Iran are providing to Russia for the
war in Ukraine have fundamentally changed Washington’s thinking.
Already, Russia and China are conducting military exercises together. Intelligence agencies are trying to determine whether Russia is aiding the North Korean and Iranian missile programs in return.
The
new document is a stark reminder that whoever is sworn in next Jan. 20
will confront a changed and far more volatile nuclear landscape than the
one that existed just three years ago. President Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear weapons against
Ukraine, including during a crisis in October 2022, when Mr. Biden and
his aides, looking at intercepts of conversations between senior Russian
commanders, feared the likelihood of nuclear use might rise to 50 percent or even higher.
Mr.
Biden, along with leaders of Germany and Britain, got China and India
to make public statements that there was no role for the use of nuclear
weapons in Ukraine, and the crisis abated, at least temporarily.
“It
was an important moment,” Richard N. Haass, a former senior State
Department and National Security Council official for several Republican
presidents, and the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign
Relations, noted in an interview. “We are dealing with a Russia that is
radicalized; the idea that nukes wouldn’t be used in a conventional
conflict is not longer a safe assumption.”
The
second big change arises from China’s nuclear ambitions. The country’s
nuclear expansion is running at an even faster pace than American
intelligence officials anticipated two years ago, driven by President Xi
Jinping’s determination to scrap the decades-long strategy of
maintaining a “minimum deterrent” to reach or exceed the size of
Washington’s and Moscow’s arsenals. China’s nuclear complex is now the
fastest growing in the world.
Although
former President Donald J. Trump confidently predicted that Kim
Jong-un, the North Korean leader, would surrender his nuclear weapons
after their three in-person meetings, the opposite happened. Mr. Kim has
doubled down, and now has more than 60 weapons, officials estimate, and
the fuel for many more.
That
expansion has changed the nature of the North Korean challenge: When
the country possessed just a handful of weapons, it could be deterred by
missile defenses. But its expanded arsenal is fast approaching the size
of Pakistan’s and Israel’s, and it is large enough that it could, in
theory, coordinate threats with Moscow and Beijing.
A soldier stands before vehicles carrying China’s DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missiles.Thomas Peter/Reuters
It
was only a matter of time before a fundamentally different nuclear
environment began to alter American war plans and strategy, officials
say.
“It
is our responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we hoped or
wished it would be,” Mr. Narang said as he was leaving the Pentagon. “It
is possible that we will one day look back and see the quarter-century
after the Cold War as nuclear intermission.”
The new challenge is “the real possibility of collaboration and even collusion between our nuclear-armed adversaries,” he said.
So
far in the presidential campaign, the new challenges to American
nuclear strategy have not been a topic of debate. Mr. Biden, who spent
much of his political career as an advocate of nuclear nonproliferation,
has never publicly talked in any detail about how he is responding to
the challenges of deterring China’s and North Korea’s expanded forces.
Nor has Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic Party’s
nominee.
At his last news conference in July,
just days before he announced he would no longer seek the Democratic
nomination for a second term, Mr. Biden acknowledged that he had adopted
a policy of seeking ways to interfere in the broader China-Russia
partnership.
“Yes,
I do, but I’m not prepared to talk about the detail of it in public,”
Mr. Biden said. He made no reference to — and was not asked about — how
that partnership was altering American nuclear strategy.
Since
Harry Truman’s presidency, that strategy has been overwhelmingly
focused on the Kremlin’s arsenal. Mr. Biden’s new guidance suggests how
quickly that is shifting.
China
was mentioned in the last nuclear guidance, issued at the end of the
Trump administration, according to an unclassified account provided to
Congress in 2020. But that was before the scope of Mr. Xi’s ambitions
were understood.
The Biden strategy sharpens that focus to reflect the Pentagon’s estimates that China’s
nuclear force would expand to 1,000 by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035, roughly
the numbers that the United States and Russia now deploy. In fact,
Beijing now appears ahead of that schedule, officials say, and has begun
loading nuclear missiles into new silo fields that were spotted by
commercial satellites three years ago.
There
is another concern about Beijing: It has now halted a short-lived
conversation with the United States about improving nuclear safety and
security — for example, by agreeing to warn each other of impending
missile tests, or setting up hotlines or other means of communication to
assure that incidents or accidents do not escalate into nuclear
encounters.
One discussion between the two countries took place late last fall, just before Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi met in California,
where they sought to repair relations between the two countries. They
referred to those talks in a joint statement, but by that time the
Chinese had already hinted they were not interested in further
discussions, and earlier this summer said the conversations were over.
They cited American arms sales to Taiwan, which were underway long
before the nuclear safety conversations began.
Mallory
Stewart, the assistant secretary for arms control, deterrence and
stability at the State Department, said in an interview that the Chinese
government was “actively preventing us from having conversations about
the risks.”
Instead,
she said, Beijing “seems to be taking a page out of Russia’s playbook
that, until we address tensions and challenges in our bilateral
relationship, they will choose not to continue our arms control, risk
reduction and nonproliferation conversations.”
It was in China’s interest, she argued, “to prevent these risks of miscalculation and misunderstanding.”
David E. Sanger covers
the Biden administration and national security. He has been a Times
journalist for more than four decades and has written several books on
challenges to American national security. More about David E. Sanger