A senior Biden administration official warned Friday that “in the absence of a change” in China and Russia’s nuclear strategy, the United States could be forced to expand its nuclear arsenal, after decades of cutting arms control agreements now in largely abandoned.
Friday’s comments from Pranay Vaddi, a senior director of the National Security Council, were the most explicit public warning yet that the United States was prepared to move from simply modernizing its arsenal to expanding it. They were also a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia about the likely U.S. reaction if the last major nuclear arms control agreement, called New START, expires in February 2026 without a replacement.
Vaddi, speaking at the annual meeting of the Arms Control Association, a group that advocates for limits on nuclear weapons, confirmed what officials have been saying in private conversations and closed testimony before Congress for more than a year. It is the inevitable consequence, they have argued, of China’s rapid nuclear expansion and Russia’s repeated threats to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
But it would be a turning point, fraught with dangers that many Americans believed they had left behind at the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Fifteen years ago, President Barack Obama outlined a vision of moving toward a world without nuclear weapons and took steps to reduce their role in American strategy and defenses. While the country’s nuclear complexes were upgraded and made safer, and older weapons were swapped for more reliable or updated versions, the United States insisted it was only “modernizing” its arsenal, not expanding it.
As vice president of the Obama administration, President Biden became the spokesperson for this strategy.
At the time, China still maintained its “minimum deterrence” policy, dating back to its first nuclear test in 1964, and Putin seemed to have little interest in fiscally ruinous arms races. That has now changed.
China is on track to match the number of nuclear weapons deployed by the United States and Russia by 2035, according to public Pentagon estimates. Putin has become obsessed with unusual weapons, including an underwater nuclear torpedo that could be launched across the Pacific to destroy the US west coast. And the United States has warned in recent months that Russia has a program underway to put a nuclear bomb into orbit.
There have been no talks with Russia since it invaded Ukraine about negotiating a replacement for New START, which limits each country to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear weapons, the type that can be launched from one continent to another.
China has been unwilling to engage in deep nuclear talks with the United States, making clear that it is not interested in arms control until its own arsenal is comparable to that of the two largest nuclear powers. (Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea have their own arsenals, although in much smaller quantities.)
While the Biden administration has not abandoned its rhetorical support for a world without nuclear weapons, officials have acknowledged that the prospects for new arms control agreements are now so remote that they have to think about new strategies.
Vaddi said the development of the B61-13 gravity bomb, a nuclear weapon intended to be used against large, rugged military targets, was an example of the type of projects the United States would pursue.
For now, the United States is upgrading, not expanding, its nuclear arsenal. But Vaddi made it clear that that could change.
“Absent a change in the trajectory of the adversary arsenal, we may reach a point in the coming years where an increase in the current number deployed is required, and we must be fully prepared to execute if the president makes that decision,” he said . .
The United States remains willing to pursue arms control agreements to reduce nuclear threats by “limiting and shaping” adversaries’ nuclear forces, Vaddi said. And citing the history of separate diplomatic tracks for such agreements, he suggested that Russia’s war in Ukraine would not be a barrier to a discussion.
But he said Russia’s rejection of talks for a successor agreement to the New Beginning has “overshadowed” diplomatic issues.
“At least in the short term, the prospects for strategic arms control are dim,” he said.
A year ago, at the same conference, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, promised a renewed effort to bring China into arms control talks. Since that speech, the United States has sought to engage the Chinese on nuclear security issues and recently held the first talks, in Geneva, to address whether it would be possible to reach an agreement that artificial intelligence should never control nuclear weapons. , among other limitations. .
That meeting was preliminary and it is unclear if others will follow. While China has urged the United States to adopt what it calls its “no-first-use” nuclear weapons policy, it has not substantially committed to U.S. proposals.
One of the complications of the current nuclear environment, administration officials say, is the possibility of Russia and China coordinating their nuclear policies, part of the “boundless partnership” that Putin and Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, announced in 2022. .
The failure of Russia and China to engage in meaningful negotiations, Vaddi said, was “forcing the United States and our closest allies and partners to prepare for a world in which nuclear competition occurs without numerical limitations.”
Modernizing the US nuclear arsenal, he argued, will give Russia and China an incentive to return to the negotiating table and put Washington in a stronger place in those talks.
“We need to persuade our adversaries that managing rivalry through arms control is preferable to unbridled competition,” he said.