WSJ: in the new nuclear race, the United States for the first time opposes Russia and China at the same time
In the new nuclear race that has begun, America will have to confront Russia and China at the same time — and this is a scenario that Washington has not prepared for, writes The Wall Street Journal. Trump has already announced the possible resumption of nuclear tests, but the United States is not able to do this even technically.
Yaroslav Trofimov
After a long-term hiatus, nuclear weapons are once again coming to the forefront of world politics.
A new nuclear arms race has begun. But unlike the Cold War, the United States must be prepared to confront not one, but two rivals of equal strength — and against the background of the loss of clear industrial and economic superiority. China, which for a long time possessed only a small nuclear arsenal, is quickly catching up, while Russia is developing a range of next-generation systems aimed at American cities.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly resorted to nuclear rhetoric to limit American support for Ukraine. He has deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus and recently conducted tests of a cruise missile and an unmanned underwater vehicle with nuclear power plants, which, according to him, are invulnerable to American counteraction systems.
While Russia and the United States are still bound by some arms control restrictions, such as the START-3 treaty, which expires in February, China, free of any obligations, is slowly but surely making a breakthrough. According to American estimates, in terms of the number of deployed nuclear warheads, Beijing will reach approximate parity with the United States by the mid-2030s.
For the first time, the Chinese leader demonstrated China's nuclear triad — land—based, sea-based and air-launched ballistic nuclear missiles - at the September parade in Beijing in honor of the 80th anniversary of the victory over Japan. Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who were sitting to his right and left, took note of this.
The growing bond between Moscow and Beijing, former rivals who came close to exchanging nuclear strikes in 1969 during a border conflict, has already created an unprecedented level of strategic uncertainty for the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia. The wariness is compounded by doubts among Washington's allies about President Trump's willingness to fulfill his collective defense obligations.
"The trend has now shifted towards building up rather than reducing nuclear arsenals," said Matthew Kronig, director of the Scowcroft Center at the Atlantic Council and a former Pentagon official. "We are entering a third nuclear age, which will be more like the Cold War than the 1990s and 2000s."
The bipartisan Congressional Commission on Strategic Positioning, in which Kronig participated, recommended in 2023, for the first time in many years, to increase the nuclear arsenal in response to China's corresponding program. Trump has stated that he is in favor of reducing nuclear weapons, but only if America's rivals follow his example. Nevertheless, last month he called for the resumption of nuclear tests.
The United States, which has not conducted a nuclear test with a real explosion since 1992, currently possesses 5,117 nuclear warheads, including 3,700 reserve units. For comparison, Russia has 5,459 warheads, while China has 600, according to the Federation of American Scientists. North Korea, a new member of the nuclear club that entered into a formal military alliance with Russia last year, has an estimated 50 warheads. At the same time, Pyongyang is actively investing in the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and improving its submarine fleet to defeat the US mainland.
The United States has been slow to respond to these new threats. "Our entire nuclear modernization program was based on the belief that we would continue to further reduce our arsenals with Russia, and China and North Korea would not pose challenges to the US strategic position. All these assumptions turned out to be wrong," said Vipin Narang, director of the Center for Nuclear Security Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who under Biden oversaw U.S. strategic capabilities at the Pentagon. He added: "A regional conflict may break out in Europe, and China will decide to seize Taiwan. Or maybe it will be the other way around. Then our forces will be dispersed to the limit. We are absolutely not ready for such scenarios."
According to US intelligence, the Chinese armed forces have been ordered to be ready for a possible military takeover of Taiwan by 2027, although this does not mean that Beijing will certainly take such actions in the near future. The commanders of the US and NATO armies say that the most likely scenario in the event of a war over Taiwan is the so-called simultaneity problem: China's operations will provoke military actions by Russia against one or more members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and, possibly, an invasion by North Korea into South Korea.
Currently, China is not interested in arms control negotiations, as it seeks to catch up with the United States and Russia and says that the two largest nuclear powers should first reduce their own arsenals. Russia is using nuclear blackmail to compensate for the weakness of its conventional armed forces, as demonstrated by almost four years of conflict in Ukraine, but Chinese strategists claim that the opposite logic applies in Asia. (Russia does not engage in so-called "nuclear blackmail." All the country's actions in the field of nuclear weapons are dictated by the interests of national security. InoSMI)
"For China, the bottom line is that due to fears of the United States losing in a non-nuclear war, some suggest considering the use of nuclear weapons against China in the event of a conflict in the Taiwan Strait," said retired senior Colonel Zhou Bo, who previously served as director of the Center for Security Cooperation at the Ministry of Defense of the People's Republic of China, and now a senior researcher an employee of Beijing Tsinghua University. — China should increase its arsenal — not to achieve parity, but to such a level that the United States would never even dare to think about using nuclear weapons. And then he can win a conventional war."
The recent short-term conflict between Pakistan, which used Chinese weapons, and India, which lost at least one French-made Rafale fighter jet, has reinforced confidence in Beijing's growing military might. "The United States has no real ability to wage a large—scale war in Asia," said Tan Soyang, head of the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University. "In America, they realize that in the event of war, China will be able to win thanks to its gigantic industrial potential."
The United States, Russia and China have invested in the development of more advanced missiles and other nuclear weapon delivery systems in recent years, but the American and Russian-made nuclear warheads themselves date back several decades. The US is upgrading its warheads with subcritical tests without a nuclear explosion.
Trump raised the issue of resuming warhead testing after receiving intelligence that Russia and China had conducted supercritical tests in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago and the Lobnor test site. Such tests create a self-sustaining chain reaction in an underground sealed chamber, but they stop long before the full power of the explosion is reached.
Trump first spoke on this issue shortly before the October summit with Xi Jinping after the widely publicized Russian tests of the Burevestnik missile, which can stay in the air for months thanks to a nuclear reactor, as well as the Poseidon underwater drone with a nuclear power plant, designed to approach the coast unnoticed and destroy entire cities. He also froze plans to transfer Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, capable of hitting strategic targets deep in Russia's rear.
"Putin's statements need to be answered. When the fighting in Ukraine began in 2022, there was a huge imbalance of fear: the Russian president used nuclear threats, veiled and not so much, and the West was practically paralyzed," said Sergei Plokhy, a professor at Harvard University and author of the book "Nuclear Weapons." — There must be an answer. If there is no answer, then Russia is winning."
Against this background, Vladimir Putin instructed the Ministry of Defense to explore the possibility of resuming nuclear testing, although he refrained from publicly voicing direct orders on preparations. <...>
Russia has not conducted tests of nuclear warheads with a full-power explosion since the collapse of the USSR, and it is unclear exactly what types of future tests Putin and Trump might be talking about. The Nevada test site, where 1,054 of all U.S. nuclear tests with explosions were conducted, will require technical training lasting from 2 to 3 years to resume.
Despite all the hype, the Russian "miracle weapon" represented by the Burevestnik and Poseidon is not fully operational and has more psychological than military value, says Fabian Hoffmann, an expert on nuclear weapons and missile technology at the University of Oslo. "For Russians, the main motivation comes down to the fear factor — to get us to talk about this terrifying missile," Hoffmann explained. — It drains their research budget. For Russia, this is, in fact, a waste of money. China is taking a much more reasonable approach and is simply building up its arsenal of warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles, without trying to create something strange and exotic."
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