The US must expand or restructure its nuclear arsenal to tackle the “existential challenge” posed by the growing nuclear threat from China and existing risk from Russia, a new report by a congressionally mandated commission has said.
The bipartisan Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the US, which is tasked with examining American strategic policy, warned that Washington was “ill-prepared” to tackle the challenge posed by having two peer nuclear adversaries for the first time.
“The new global environment is fundamentally different than anything experienced in the past, even in the darkest days of the cold war,” the panel warned in the report.
“The US is on the cusp of having not one, but two nuclear peer adversaries, each with ambitions to change the international status quo, by force, if necessary,” it said.
In a 160-page report produced after more than 100 briefings from security and intelligence officials, the 10-member commission argued that the US must restructure its nuclear forces quickly to meet the rising threat.
“US defence strategy to address the two-nuclear-peer threat requires a US nuclear force that is either larger in size, different in composition, or both,” the panel said, adding that the US “lacks a comprehensive strategy to address the looming two-nuclear-peer threat environment”.
The growing sense of alarm has been largely sparked by the rapid expansion in China’s nuclear arsenal, which the report said was occurring “on a scale and pace unseen since the US-Soviet nuclear arms race that ended in the late 1980s”.
The Pentagon last year said China had 400 nuclear warheads and was on track to expand its stockpile to 1,500 by the middle of the next decade. If that projection comes true, Beijing will have as many warheads as the US and Russia have deployed under the terms of the New Start arms control treaty.
The commission was led by Madelyn Creedon, a former top nuclear official, and Jon Kyl, a retired senator. It was created by Congress in 2022 to re-examine US nuclear policy and force structure more than a decade after former defence secretary William Perry ran the first such commission.
The panel said the existing US plan to modernise its nuclear arsenal was “necessary but not sufficient” to respond to the mounting threat and that Washington needed to “pursue additional measures and programmes”.
Among dozens of recommendations, it said the US had to address the rising number of nuclear-related targets in China. Washington also had to consider the fact that Beijing could pursue large-scale deployment of long-range missiles that could threaten US nuclear weapons at home, it added.
The panel said the US should boost the number of B-21 strategic bombers planned for production and do the same for nuclear-armed air-launched cruise missiles. It also called for an increase in the planned production of Columbia-class nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines.
In a recommendation that is likely to spark debate in Asia, the commission said the US had to address the need for theatre nuclear forces — those which would be used for a regional conflict — to be deployed in the Asia-Pacific region.
The commissioners called on the US to invest more in missile defence, including systems that could “deter and defeat coercive attacks by Russia and China”.
They also urged the US government to examine the feasibility of developing systems to counter attacks from hypersonic missiles — underscoring the growing concern about China since the country tested a highly advanced hypersonic missile that circumnavigated the globe in 2021.
