Good day, everyone, and thanks for inviting me back to Hudson to offer some thoughts – in purely personal capacity, of course, rather than on behalf of the MITRE Corporation’s Center for Strategic Competition or Stanford University’s  Hoover Institution – on the Biden Administration’s new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and some of what I think it signals about the dramatic new strategic threat environment we face.

It’s hard to overstate the shift that the NPR makes clear has now occurred.  Since the beginning of the nuclear era, the strategic environment has had two fundamental characteristics from a nuclear weapons perspective. 

First, it has had a bilateral or dyadic structure in which the core challenges of deterrence and strategic stability revolved around a tense U.S. nuclear weapons stand-off against single nuclear “peer” or “near-peer” adversary state.

Second, a global context has been one in which the United States had at least a “second-to-none” conventional military force posture, and in which that position of power and global reach was backed up by a vastly predominant civilian economy with huge industrial and productive capacities, enormous relative wealth compared to the other states of the world, and a spot at the leading edge of technological innovation. 

From the perspective of how American leaders – and how the broader nuclear weapons, arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament community – have viewed the strategic environment, there’s also a third factor.  When the end of the Cold War nuclear rivalry thankfully made it no longer necessary to maintain huge Cold War-level nuclear arsenals, the idea took root that it was not just desirable but finally now actually possible eventually actually to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons.

From this notion, as the two former strategic adversaries began slashing the size of their stockpiles, it became an assumption – not just of international diplomacy but also of much of our own strategic planning – that the nuclear weapons world was on an inevitable and irreversible trajectory toward “Zero.”  True, one might quarrel (and fiercely!) over the pace, timing, tactics, and relative prioritization of agenda items as the world moves moved somehow along this path.  Nevertheless, as any of you who have spent any significant period of time in the diplomatic and national policy community related to nuclear issues will recognize, the “Teleology of Zero” acquired an almost axiomatic, unquestioned salience.

Finally, last generation also saw a fourth assumption become deeply ingrained in the policy arena: the idea that in the world of nuclear threats, the most worrisome and troubling ones – that is, if you will, the pacing threat, to the degree that any nuclear threats were actually increasing, which, as noted, on the whole they weren’t doing thanks to the end of the Cold War – were those related to nuclear weapons proliferation.  The nuclear weapons problem of the early post-Cold War era was that of rogue regimes acquiring those dangerous tools and thereby catalyzing deeply destabilizing regional conflict and potential nuclear use dynamics.

So those four things were, for years and years, essentially architectural assumptions for the nuclear policy community.  But what does the new NPR tell us about these four elements?   Well, events have clearly called all four of them rather profoundly into question.

For one thing, it’s quite clear from the NPR that the primary nuclear threats come today from the near-peers of Russia and China, especially the latter.  The rogues we all love to hate are still hugely problematic, but they are being outshone by even darker suns in the threat firmament, as it were, and their dangers are today, alas, not the most pressing.

What’s more, today’s nuclear threats are rapidly increasing, and the main problem from our two big strategic adversaries.  As the new National Defense Strategy (NDS) phrases it, Russia is the most immediate “acute threat,” while China is the greater long-term one, now clearly the “pacing threat” for U.S. nuclear planning.

The Russians, the NPR notes, are both modernizing and expanding their nuclear arsenal and the Kremlin is “brandishing nuclear weapons in support of its revisionist security policy.”  To be specific, Moscow has been using that growing nuclear arsenal – which, by the way, is much larger than our own if you count the thousands of shorter-range weapons Putin has been using in so much recent nuclear saber-rattling – “as a shield behind which to wage unjustified aggression against their neighbors.”  This is a qualitatively new element in the strategic environment. 

And as for China, the pace of that “pacing threat” is accelerating alarmingly.  The NPR plays a little bit of hide-the-ball here even by comparison with the Biden Defense Department’s own 2022 China military power report released a few weeks later, China is building up its arsenal at an extraordinary pace.  Indeed, according to that more recent report, by 2035 China is likely to have about 1,500 deliverable strategic warheads – a figure that is actually larger than the U.S. arsenal right now, according to our September 2022 New START declaration.  So Beijing is sprinting at least for parity, and perhaps even more.

As a result of the Russian and especially the Chinese nuclear weapons build up, therefore, the strategic nuclear deterrence and stability problem is no longer dyadic.  As the NPR observes: “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.  This will create new stresses on stability and new challenges for deterrence and risk reduction.” 

So that’s three of the four architectural assumptions down.  But what is also quite striking about the Biden NPR is the degree that – even for an administration stuffed full of veterans of the Obama Administration, with all its disarmament rhetoric and its Nobel Prize for raising everyone’s hopes about more progress toward a world without nuclear weapons – the new document makes pretty clear that thanks to Russia and China, the Zero Teleology has run out of steam.

One might have expected President Joe Biden’s team to follow up on Vice President Joe Biden’s promise in January 2017 to ensure that the “sole purpose” of nuclear weapons is to deter the use of other nuclear weapons – a disarmament community construct that flies in the face of pretty much every nuclear weapons possessors’ approach to nuclear weapons and understanding of nuclear deterrence ever, but that seems to be designed to tee up the idea that “gosh, if that’s true, we can simply abolish them all at the same time and no one will be the worse.”  But the new NPR doesn’t merely decline to adopt “sole purpose.”  It also actually adopts the Trump Administration’s declaratory policy that nuclear weapons have a role in deterring what are now termed “other high consequence, strategic level attacks,” whether or not such attacks take nuclear form. 

More notably, despite performative rhetorical flourishes about how much the Biden Administration hopes at some point to resume progress toward disarmament, one also sees in the new NPR an all but explicit retirement both of the Zero Teleology’s anticipation of continued inevitable and irreversible progress and of the idea of the United States “leading” global progress toward disarmament.  Fundamentally, the Biden NPR pledges that the United States will maintain nuclear forces that are “responsive to the threats we face” even while detailing how the nuclear threats we face are growing. 

This certainly begs the question of whether, in a dramatically worsening strategic environment, we the United States needs even more nuclear capabilities.  At the very least, the Biden Administration officially declares the march of forward disarmament progress basically to have stopped.

Any resumed progress toward disarmament, the NPR notes, would require major changes in the “security environment.”  Specifically, any “major changes in the role of nuclear weapons in our strategies for the PRC and Russia will require verifiable reductions or constraints on their nuclear forces.” If there is to be a chance for resuming post-Cold War progress disarmament, in other words, the burden now lies upon China and Russia to turn things around by stopping their escalatory provocations.  The United States isn’t trying to “leading” this anymore, and – impliedly – we may even need to respond to growing threats in ways that might in some respect start to turn the ratchet back.   

To be sure, one shouldn’t give the Biden team too much credit for novelty here. The Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy, NDS, and NPR and officials working in this area made these same basic points rather clear several years ago.  That said, with these key realizations about the strategic environment and its trajectory having been now validated both by the U.S. political Right and now also by the political Left, we clearly really do have a structural and conceptual earthquake on our hands.  The need to struggle against deep and paradigm-changing competitive challenges is, one might say, the new normal.

Specifically, the Biden NPR signals that all four of the structural foundations of the received wisdom of the strategic policy community are in some sense now up for grabs: (1) the strategic threat and whatever deterrence and stability dynamics are operative no longer exist on a merely dyadic basis, but now at the least trilateral, with all the risks and ambiguities this implies; (2) the United States faces not just two strategic adversaries, but also a situation in which one of them has a combination of economic weight, technological sophistication, and conventional military power and global reach that the Soviets never had even at their most threatening; (3) proliferation is no longer the biggest nuclear threat, for we now face our gravest challenges from massive, nuclear-armed strategic competitors; and (4) thanks to the provocative and destabilizing actions and policies of those massive nuclear-armed strategic challengers, one can pretty much forget about forward progress on nuclear disarmament for the foreseeable future.

That’s a lot of change, for which the global nuclear policy community is not well prepared.  The Biden NPR – coming as a validating echo of so much of the strategic vision one saw in the Trump Administration – confirms that we are indeed in a new world, and one that is far darker and more grimly threatening than anything else most of us have seen in our professional lifetimes.

The obvious question, then, is what do we do?  Unfortunately, the answer is less obvious. 

To my eye, the fundamental challenge is actually conceptual.  We have never faced a two-peer strategic nuclear challenge before – and indeed, nobody has – and it’s not clear what a stable equilibrium is or even could be for the emergent “three-body problem.”

On the positive side, this may be a valuable opportunity to think creatively about our nuclear posture and doctrine from the ground up.  Even for today’s threats, after all, if one were devising a posture and doctrine from scratch, one might well not want exactly what we have – that is, simply a miniaturized version of the legacy architecture we felt we needed for a very different, Soviet-focused challenge 40 or more years ago.  Perhaps the new threat environment today presents an opportunity to re-examine things on the basis of what seems likely to deter today’s Russia as well as China, and what we might need for warfighting in the event, God forbid, that deterrence were to fail.  Perhaps a serious review of the emerging three-body problem will help point us to new approaches or new systems – both nuclear and non-nuclear – that can handle these challenges better than what we have now. 

On the negative side, we still don’t really know – at least not yet – what “optimum” looks like in dealing with the two-peer challenge.  We may not know enough to know even when we’re just “satisficing.”

And on top of that, there are the problems of resources and politics. 

One possible answer to the challenge is simply to keep trying to cover down on potential adversary targets for both Russia and China, simultaneously, as we have long tried to do simply for Russia.  But having to maintain an arsenal significantly larger than either of theirs may not be a viable option for reasons of cost, limited productive capacity, and politics. 

After all, U.S. administrations of both political flavors have failed to properly support our infrastructure for decades, and we’ve barely maintained a political consensus to spend money merely on our current program of legacy system modernization.  Moreover, the Biden NPR’s cancelation of the Submarine-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear (SLCM-N) and the B83 bomb – two distinct and important types of nuclear capability for which no replacement is as yet anywhere on the horizon – suggests that even now, the political Left in this country may still not have quite weaned itself of performative anti-nuclear virtue signaling. 

Nor is it clear that simply matching the adversary’s arsenal one-for-one is the right answer in the first place.  This goes back to my point about having to get our theory right as we struggle with the three-body problem.  We need huge numbers of weapons only if weneed huge numbers of weapons; the mere fact that a potential adversary has huge numbers may be relevant, but it does not in itself necessarily demonstrate our own need for them.   It’s much more important to ascertain what is likely to deter that adversary, and raw U.S. arsenal size may or may not be it. 

And if it turns out that a numerical increase does need to be part of the solution, the only real answer for the United States in the short term is simply to upload existing delivery systems with more warheads out of our strategic reserve.  Under the counting rules of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), we can already do this to a limited extent with strategic bombers, and if we are willing to forego limits entirely after 2026 when that treaty expires, we could do considerably more.

But we shouldn’t forget that the Russians can also upload on a significant scale. Moreover, they probably have greater throughput in their nuclear weapons production infrastructure than we do. 

Furthermore, China also seems to be building a significant upload “hedge” for itself.  According to the Department of Defense’s 2022 China military power report, the more than 300 new intercontinental ballistic missile silos Beijing is building may come to be filled with the new Dong Feng-41 missile.  The DF-41 is assessed to be “likely” to be deployed with only three warheads, but it is capable of carrying many more than that.  Especially given that the DoD’s 2022 report describes Beijing as preparing new plutonium production lines to produce fissile material usable in its nuclear weapons program, the DF-41s could likely be uploaded significantly. 

So while uploading is probably the only feasible short-term answer if we decide we need a numerical boost in response to Russian and Chinese threats, it’s a game that others can play too.  And it doesn’t offer any particular long-term advantage. 

The Biden NPR may not have been intended to make this conclusion so unmistakable, but we obviously need to focus with great urgency upon recalculating our nuclear weapons needs for this new era.  Neither I nor anyone else can yet offer a clear and compelling vision for exactly what it is we need to meet the threats presented by the Chinese and Russian nuclear build-ups – and whether, and in what ways, that might differ from what we are already pursuing through our current modernization program.  But it’s time to start figuring that out.

In the near term, to help be more prepared to bridge to whatever it is determined that our three-body future requires, I would suggest that at a minimum we need to do three things.

• First, we should suspend the Biden administration’s unilateral cancellation of the nuclear cruise missile and the B83 bomb.  Those moves were absolutely the wrong signal to send right now.

• Second, we should begin technical and programmatic preparations for exercising the “upload option” in response to China’s current sprint toward what looks like it will be at least strategic nuclear parity.  I don’t suggest we start uploading yet, but we need to make it clear to Beijing that parity – much less overmatch – will come neither as easily nor as quickly as Communist Party planners may have hoped, and that’s a way to start sending the signal.

• And third, we should rush more resources, human capital, and political support into finally modernizing the U.S. weapons production infrastructure upon which all our deterrence depends – and which is a critical both for deterring a long-term arms race and in meeting whatever new or different weapons needs the worsening security environment may create.

Despite its residual pro-disarmament flourishes, the Biden NPR – and its remarkable degree of congruence with the Trump Administration’s strategic vision – powerfully signals the arrival of a grim and challenging new era.  We need to take this seriously, and begin figuring out what we need in this new environment. 

-- Christopher Ford