The time for reconciliation still seems far away. For the first time in its history, the United States has changed its nuclear strategy, and now China’s expansion of its nuclear arsenal is taking center stage, revealed Tuesday, August 20, 2024 New York Times . According to the Pentagon, the diversity and size of China’s arsenal is expected to rival that of the United States and Russia within the next decade.
Considering the “significant increase” in China’s nuclear arsenal
No mention of this change had been made since March, when Joe Biden reportedly approved this development. We had to wait many weeks before we heard the first official mentions. In early August, Vipin Narang, a strategist speaking at the end of his stint as an adviser to the Pentagon, said that “The President recently issued updated guidance on the use of nuclear weapons to account for multiple nuclear-armed adversaries”. He particularly referred to “significant increase in size and diversity” of the Chinese nuclear arsenal.
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Previously, Pranay Vaddi, director of the National Security Council, explained in June that the new strategy was the first to “consider Russia, the People’s Republic of China and North Korea simultaneously”. David E. Sanger, an American journalist who has written about nuclear strategy for New York daily for almost forty years, explains that this strategy is contained in a document “highly classified”updated every four years and which has no digital version but only a few rare paper copies.
Russia, China and North Korea: the rapid and simultaneous growth of nuclear arsenals
This change is unprecedented because the US did not foresee cooperation between its adversaries, which the war in Ukraine especially denied. China and Russia have already conducted joint nuclear exercises, the American media remind us, and Vladimir Putin has increased nuclear threats since the start of the war in Ukraine.
Americans then have no choice but to take the state led by Xi Jinping seriously, given the rapid growth of its nuclear arsenal. This is experiencing the fastest increase in the world and may be similar to Washington or Moscow in 2035. In North Korea, Kim Jong-un continues to increase his arsenal, which now counts at least 60 nuclear weapons. An arsenal that could so quickly catch up with Pakistan’s or Israel’s.
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Since 1945 and the presidency of Harry S. Truman, American strategy has been almost exclusively focused on Russia. Vipin Narang then explained that it was important to “see the world as it is and not as we would like it to be”. For him we must not remove the thought of it “a quarter of a century after the Cold War is a nuclear blackout”and we must therefore take that seriously “the real possibility of collaboration and even collusion” between America’s nuclear-armed adversaries.