Biden’s Nuclear Strategy Is About Living With a Dangerous World

Last month, as part of the new National Defense Strategy and amid Russia’s ongoing attempts at nuclear intimidation in Ukraine, the Biden administration released the public version of its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). Each U.S. president since Bill Clinton has conducted an NPR early in his first term, as a statement of policy on why the United States has nuclear weapons, when and how it would consider using them, and which weapons it will need in future. Most of the time they go almost unnoticed by anyone outside the world of nuclear wonks—but with Russia brandishing nuclear weapons as it loses ground in Ukraine and tensions high with China, it’s worth paying attention to where the United States stands. Here are five takeaways from the 25-page NPR.

1. China could try nuclear coercion, too.

Strategic reviews are often accused of “fighting the last war.” The Biden NPR is focused in large part on fighting the current one. Russia’s attempts to use nuclear rhetoric to convince Ukraine and the West to scale back their war aims, and the concern that Russia might use a small number of nuclear weapons to end the war on its terms, loom large over this NPR. Russian leaders see nuclear weapons as a “shield behind which to wage unjustified aggression against their neighbors,” the review says, and “[d]eterring Russian limited nuclear use in a regional conflict is a high U.S. and NATO priority.”

The recent U.S. National Security Strategy suggests this problem is likely to get worse, as Russia’s conventional military disaster in Ukraine leads it to rely more on nuclear weapons in the future, and the NPR points to the possibility of China adopting a similar strategy in Asia. The review says China’s startling nuclear buildup will give it more options in a regional crisis or war, including nuclear coercion or limited first use. The way the review describes China’s future nuclear arsenal—“diverse,” with a “high degree of survivability, reliability, and effectiveness”—is very different from China’s historically more rudimentary posture, which has focused on being able to deliver large-scale retaliation if struck with nuclear weapons first. The NPR itself doesn’t get much more specific than this. But it adds weight to speculation elsewhere that China’s goal is to be able to threaten, or actually carry out, limited nuclear attacks with lower-yield, shorter-range systems in order to help it win a conventional conflict in the region without escalating to a full-scale nuclear exchange with the United States.

Washington has a clear interest in knocking down the idea that nuclear coercion, or even limited use, is a winning strategy. This is not only about nuclear risk per se but about U.S. military freedom of action: The NPR says the “ability to deter limited nuclear use is … key to deterring non-nuclear aggression.” If an adversary knows it can threaten nuclear escalation to get its way, the review says, “it will be more difficult for our leaders to make the decision to project conventional military power to protect vital national security interests—and far more dangerous to do so should that decision be made.”

Two practical implications flow from this concern: Firstly, in line with other measures in the broader National Defense Strategy, the review calls for greater resilience against limited nuclear attack, including better protected conventional weapon systems, protective equipment for U.S. and allied troops, and “enhanced mission assurance” of space systems used for conventional warfare. The logic is that if an adversary knows that U.S. allies can fight on after a limited use of nuclear weapons, such use loses its attractiveness as a war-ending coup de main. But it also suggests the next point.

2. Nuclear cuts will be limited, and new weapons are in the pipeline.

The Biden administration believes that deterring limited nuclear use requires being able to threaten retaliation with a comparably limited nuclear strike. The NPR not only retains air-delivered bombs and cruise missiles for this purpose—it also keeps the W76-2 warhead, a lower-yield version of the W76 warhead type for submarine-launched ballistic missiles. As a presidential candidate, Biden called the W76-2, developed during the Trump administration, a “bad idea.” But the NPR states bluntly that “the W76-2 currently provides an important means to deter limited nuclear use” and cites it as a part of deterrence vis-à-vis Russia and China.

The Trump administration had also proposed and begun planning for a nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N). According to the NPR, this weapon will be cut on the basis that, with the addition of the W76-2, the United States now has enough options to wage limited nuclear war. Republicans in Congress, and some Democrats, have other ideas. The House and Senate armed services committees have been fighting to reinsert the SLCM-N into the draft defense authorization bill for next year. There is a good chance that Congress will force the Biden administration into continuing to pay for research and development work, and Republicans will hope that they can run out the clock on the current administration and get the SLCM-N—which, they point out, has enjoyed the vocal support of the head of U.S. Strategic Command—built under a Republican successor. A similar dynamic is at play regarding the B83-1, a high-yield gravity bomb that the Biden administration has decided to retire and which Congress may yet try to preserve.

Meanwhile, hopes by some advocates that the Biden administration would choose not to build a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles but instead extend the life of the Minuteman III were entirely dashed. The NPR says firmly that any such decision would “increase risk and cost” and gives a full greenlight for the successor Sentinel missile. The W93/Mk7 warhead, on which the United Kingdom is relying as a basis for its own successor nuclear warhead, will also proceed. The U.S. nuclear warhead production complex will be geared up again to produce new weapons from scratch, leaving behind the “partial refurbishment” strategy of the past few decades.

3. Integrating nuclear and nonnuclear deterrence is still a goal.

The National Defense Strategy, inside which the NPR nests, goes big on the idea of “integrated deterrence.” The administration says this means “working seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, all instruments of U.S. national power, and our network of Alliances and partnerships.” In the conventional military realm, a lively debate is underway about whether the concept is useful. The risks include stretching the concept of deterrence too far and failing to actually guide change rather than encouraging services to rebrand things they already wanted to do as “integrated deterrence.”

In the strategic realm, integration does have clear, concrete meanings, some of which are controversial. The NPR promises to assess which nonnuclear weapons are able to “complement” nuclear weapons in a deterrent posture and “will integrate these capabilities into operational plans, as appropriate.” Pointedly, the National Defense Strategy says the United States will help allies and partners on Russia’s borders to develop “response options that enable cost imposition”—that is, the United States will not only build up its allies’ defenses but help them prepare to actively punish Russia for aggression. The Biden NPR also builds on a key feature of the Trump review by emphasizing the need for “better synchronizing” of nuclear and nonnuclear planning and exercises. Along with the decision to increase resilience against limited nuclear attacks and the assertion that deterring limited nuclear use is part of deterring conventional war, this NPR follows in its predecessor’s footsteps by eschewing a clear firebreak between nuclear and nonnuclear policy and planning.

4. China’s buildup might mean tough changes.

The fact that Russia has a nuclear arsenal numbered in the thousands while China’s currently has only hundreds leads to a necessary asymmetry of focus between the National Defense Strategy—where China is the “overall pacing challenge for U.S. defense planning”—and the NPR, where Russia is said to remain the only existential threat to the U.S. homeland. But the review rightly points to the world around the corner: China, which has “embarked on an ambitious expansion, modernization, and diversification of its nuclear forces and established a nascent nuclear triad,” is a “growing factor in evaluating our nuclear deterrent.”

The implications of this change are obliquely expressed: The review says that “as the security environment evolves, changes in U.S. strategy and force posture may be required to sustain the ability to achieve deterrence, assurance, and employment objectives for both Russia and [China].” But it does not take much deciphering to work out the question around which this answer is dancing: If China joins Russia as a nuclear peer, will the United States need more nuclear weapons?

Russia’s war in Ukraine and the distance that China still has to travel before reaching nuclear peer status have meant that this debate has not yet truly emerged in the public sphere in the United States. But make no mistake, it is a live one, and some first warning shots have already been fired. Two distinguished former officials under the George W. Bush administration, for example, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in September that “in order to be able to absorb a first strike and retaliate against an aggressor while also holding in reserve sufficient forces to deter the other near peer may, in the future, require larger numbers of deployed warheads than currently allowed under New START”—the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and the United States.

If nothing qualitatively changes in U.S. nuclear planning, and if the United States thinks it has to be able to absorb a simultaneous first strike by two peer nuclear opponents and still be able to hit targets in those two countries equivalent to those it can hit now, this logic holds. The United States will need more nuclear weapons—possibly many more—if it is to keep up with the combined nuclear arsenals of Russia and China. But this might not be physically and financially possible, and it may have unacceptable political and strategic consequences in terms of the reaction from Russia and China and the impact on global nonproliferation norms. The Biden NPR might not have answered this question, but the next one will probably have to.

5. Deterrence is placed over reduction.

Every president since Clinton has ordered a review of the U.S. nuclear posture as a vehicle for changes to forces and policy. Major changes, however, have been hard to come by. Barack Obama was persuaded to accept less ambitious disarmament measures than he wanted because of concerns about how U.S. allies would take the news and was forced to spend more on U.S. nuclear weapons infrastructure than he would have liked as payment for the U.S. Senate ratifying New START. Bush had provocative ideas for a new deterrence concept (the so-called new triad) and for new nuclear weapons (the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator and the Reliable Replacement Warhead). Congress killed both new weapons, and the new deterrence concept did not stick.

Biden has spent more than 40 years immersed in debates about nuclear strategy and has been a consistent advocate of arms control. His interim strategic guidance, released last March, duly started with an instruction to “take steps to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security.” That has not happened. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a key proposal had failed: namely, that the United States should say the “sole purpose” of its nuclear weapons was to deter the use of nuclear weapons by others. This was something Biden had advocated for as vice president, and he must surely have been prepared to ride out the inevitable criticism from domestic opponents that the policy projected weakness or that it was tantamount to a promise never to use nukes first—a political bridge too far. U.S. allies, however, told the administration that saying “sole purpose” could encourage Russia, China, and North Korea to worry too little about U.S. nuclear weapons, undermining the deterrent effect of the U.S. nuclear umbrella and encouraging aggression under the nuclear threshold.

For an administration determined not to rock the boat with allies scarred by the Trump years, this was a killer argument, and by roughly this time last year it was already clear that “sole purpose” was effectively dead. The NPR repeats the Obama-era formulation that the “fundamental role of nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack on the United States, our Allies, and partners,” explaining that “nuclear weapons are required to deter not only nuclear attack, but also a narrow range of other high consequence, strategic-level attacks.”

This retreat on declaratory policy, the focus on conventional-nuclear integration, the insistence on the need for limited nuclear options (and implied acceptance of the premise that a nuclear war could stay “limited”), and the preservation of all but a couple of capabilities in the Trump nuclear portfolio add up to a review that values strengthening deterrence much more than it does reducing the role of nuclear weapons.

The review does show that at least some parts of the administration are giving serious thought to the risks of the nuclear decade the United States is entering. It identifies principles for crisis stability that it will follow in designing deterrence strategies and mechanisms for avoiding misperceptions (both by the United States and its opponents), and it goes into some detail about precautions against the unauthorized launch of a nuclear weapon. It calls for a follow-on to New START and lays out priorities for dialogue with China. Yet the NPR’s insistence that the United States is “placing renewed emphasis on arms control, nuclear nonproliferation, and risk reduction” rings hollow. Renewed emphasis when compared with the Trump administration, certainly—but that’s a low bar.

This can all be justified, and the NPR makes a robust case. There is a war on, and the man who started it is trying to intimidate Americans and Europeans by flaunting Russia’s nuclear weapons. The United States, with its European and Asian allies in mind, will have been concerned about sending a message of weakness. And, like it or not, the global trend is for nuclear weapons to become more relevant, not less.

The Biden administration has decided to live as best it can in the coming nuclear world, rather than take unilateral risks to change it. It is a decision that has disappointed arms control advocates outside government and probably some inside government, too. One day, a Nuclear Posture Review might mark a moment when a president decides that the long-term risks of relying on nuclear deterrence are too much to bear and that radically reducing the role of America’s nukes is worth both the political cost and the danger that adversaries will gain an edge. But not this review and not this president.