In deep secrecy, Biden signed a new American nuclear strategy in March, The New York Times reported. The four-year document exists only as hard copies, which are being handed out to key staff and military officials. Judging by the leaks, it instructs Washington to prepare for a combined attack from China, Russia and North Korea.
The Pentagon believes that China’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will reach the size of the arsenal of the United States and Russia within the next decade. That’s why Biden approved a revised strategy called the Nuclear Use Guidance, which also seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from China, Russia and North Korea. The document is so classified that there are no electronic copies, only a small number of paper copies distributed to a handful of national security and Pentagon command officials, The New York Times reported.
Only two senior administration officials were allowed to hint at the new strategy. According to one of them, it focuses on ‘the need to deter Russia, the PRC and North Korea at the same time.’
In the past, the possibility that US adversaries could coordinate nuclear threats to outsmart the US nuclear arsenal seemed unlikely. But the emerging partnership between Russia and China has fundamentally changed Washington’s thinking.
Russia and China are already conducting joint military exercises. Intelligence agencies are trying to determine whether Russia is retaliating by helping North Korea and Iran’s missile programmes.
The new document is a stark reminder that whoever is sworn in on 20 January next year will face a changed and far more explosive nuclear landscape than existed just three years ago. At the time of the October 2022 crisis, Biden and his aides, studying intercepts of conversations between senior Russian commanders, feared that the likelihood of using nuclear weapons could increase to 50 per cent or even higher.
The second big change has to do with China’s nuclear ambitions. The country’s nuclear expansion is proceeding at an even faster pace than U.S. intelligence officials expected two years ago. China’s nuclear complex is now the fastest growing in the world. Officials say Beijing has already begun loading nuclear missiles into new silo fields that were spotted by commercial satellites three years ago.