The expiration of the New START Treaty at the beginning of this year points to an ever-changing security age between the United States, Russia, and other nuclear-armed states. Today, American policymakers find themselves in a “two-peer” nuclear environment in which rising concerns of Sino-Russian collusion are shaping critical policy decisions in Washington — including requests for a military budget of $1.5 trillion in FY2027.
March’s Reimagining US Grand Strategy roundtable brought members of the foreign policy community together to consider what the end of the New START treaty could mean for arms control efforts between the great powers. Two guest speakers provided opening remarks on how Beijing’s expanding nuclear arsenal and Moscow’s interest in non-strategic systems have impacted US nuclear policy. The group then debated the outlook for arms control, especially the likelihood of an emerging arms control agreement in the near- to long-term future.
Melanie W. Sisson, Senior Fellow, Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology, Brookings Institution
Steam is gathering behind the idea that the United States needs to prepare to have more and to deploy more nuclear weapons. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and his gestures at possible nuclear use during its course have contributed to a general unease about nuclear affairs. But the primary driver of complaints about the inadequacy of the US nuclear arsenal is China.
In 1990, the US government estimated that China had approximately 200 warheads. In 2010 and 2016, also approximately 200 nuclear warheads. In 2020, the estimate grew to between 200 and 300; in 2024 it was 600; and the US government now predicts that by 2030 China’s arsenal will hold 1,000 nuclear weapons.
Much is made of this accretion — indeed, together with the modernization of its conventional military, China has been described as engaging “in the largest military buildup in human history.” This assessment depends, of course, on what is being measured — ships, troops, bombs, budgets — and over what period of time. But it bears remembering that, in 1950, the United States had less than 300 nuclear weapons and that by 1967 it had more than 30,000.
There is little evidence that changes in the size of the US nuclear arsenal have caused measurable changes in the frequency with which other actors challenge Washington’s interests, or improved US success in coercive diplomacy. Variation in the arsenal’s composition, location, and targeting also have not affected the most essential nuclear outcome: Neither the United States, nor the allies to whom it has extended its atomic protection, has ever suffered a nuclear attack.
It is possible that this constancy is evidence that US nuclear strategy has been exceptionally prescient. That American analysts, policymakers, and military officials have thus far unerringly discerned which combinations of weapons, locations, and targets restrain the nuclear impulses of the country’s adversaries.
It is also possible, however, that US nuclear strategy is spurious. That the only necessary and sufficient condition for deterrence to obtain is the knowledge that launching a nuclear strike risks receiving one in return. That it is simply fear of suffering the devastation and horror caused by even one detonation, and of the possibility that it won’t be only one, that keeps even itchy fingers from pulling the nuclear trigger.
China’s own history with nuclear weapons supports this view. It entered the nuclear club in the 1960s as a second-strike minimalist, and its nuclear arsenal has since been organized as a responsive force; it isn’t designed to hit first but to hit last. And so its arsenal’s size should not be expected to stay static but rather to be elastic to its perceptions of the likelihood of suffering a bolt from the blue.
Even if growth in China’s nuclear arsenal does not reflect insecurity about its second-strike capability — even if, that is, Beijing is dispensing with nuclear moderation and making a run at nuclear parity — America’s own second-strike capability will endure. The United States today maintains more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and 800 delivery vehicles that are widespread, mobile, hardened, and hidden.
The imperative for the United States, therefore, is not mathematical. Rather, it is mechanical —the need is to ensure survivability. This might argue for an expansion of the submarine fleet; except that US nuclear-armed submarines (SSBNs) will remain very difficult to find for a long time to come, and already carry around 1,000 warheads. If only 44 of these majority 90KT bombs were detonated on population centers in Russia, the result would be the immediate death of somewhere in the range of eight to 12 million people. In China, they would kill between 25 and 40 million. An illustrative study by climate scientists adds the deaths of 97,000,000 to 1.4 billion worldwide over the two years thereafter from post-nuclear famine.
If a US strike were designed to attack China’s nuclear forces and thereby limit Beijing’s ability to do nuclear damage to the US homeland, the atmospheric implications would be even greater. One estimate that applies the historical US standard for damage expectancy calculates that conducting a strike on just the silo-based portion of China’s current arsenal — which would not constitute a 100% damage limitation strike — would require about 700 warheads. Assuming, just for the sake of argument, an average yield of 200KT per warhead, the result would be a total yield of 140MT. Applying the climate science here pushes the global death toll after two years into the range of 360,000,000 to 5,081,000,000.
Of course, these are just estimates. The effects could be lesser in magnitude. Or greater. Regardless, the numbers give lie to the notion that counterforce strikes limit damage.
Given, then, that there is little evidence that arsenal size translates into coercive success, and given that it is anti-scientific to think counterforce strikes can insulate America from nuclear harm, the only and essential question is how many warheads is enough to ensure the United States retains its own damage-inflicting second-strike capability.
On this, who can say, really? Except that it is certainly more than one, and surely not more than 5,000.
Carl Parkin, Foreign Policy Futures, Reimagining US Grand Strategy, Stimson Center
Change-making in nuclear weapons policy is hard. There are two generally recognized ways of inciting change in foreign policy: convincing the elites or convincing the public. Both are incredibly difficult tasks when it comes to nuclear weapons.
Even among the rather insulated superset of foreign policy experts, the nuclear field is famously insular; its experts have been compared to wizards — the idea being that nuclear wonks are members of a secretive cabal that commands mastery of highly esoteric knowledge. That knowledge is often communicated in cold, dispassionate jargon, a lingua franca that scholars have alleged does not even provide the linguistic tools necessary to discuss topics such as empathy or peace.
Additionally, in order to change US nuclear policy, you don’t just need to convince political leaders and the nuclear priesthood, but also the men and women of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM). Time and time again, in the 20th century, attempts by political leaders to right the ship of US nuclear strategy would run aground on the intransigence of STRATCOM’s predecessor, Strategic Air Command. Whether modern attempts would fare any better is difficult to say.
Leveraging public opinion may look like the best way out of this predicament. A majority of adults support disarmament — why not use that statistic for political ends? A theory of a nuclear change-making that relies on public opinion suffers from two deficiencies: a lack of issue salience, and a lack of public knowledge about the intricacies of the nuclear debate. Most Americans fail to understand why, for example, missile defense is considered escalatory by many in the nuclear policy community — how could defense, after all, make us less safe? For that reason, nuclear opinions, including those regarding nuclear use, seem to be highly susceptible to conditions and elite influence.
In theory, public education would help solve this problem. A better-informed American populace would be less susceptible to elite cues and better able to articulate an anti-nuclear position. That’s why, every few years, a new public education or community organizing campaign emerges from the nuclear think tank community. These programs are monumental efforts, and the work behind them should be lauded. But their long-term efficacy is debatable — in a world where climate change, artificial intelligence, and other existential threats take up so much of our brain space; the need for disarmament simply doesn’t seem urgent to many people.
So, we’re at an impasse. The elites are stuck in their ways. The populace is difficult to meaningfully affect. The fact that there is no convincing theory of change for nuclear policy should be the pre-eminent issue in the field. Rather than relitigating the same debates about the intricacies of nuclear strategy, those interested in changing US nuclear policy should investigate how they can ensure that their ideas are heard and adopted. This will mean leveraging the insights of other fields and stepping outside of the box for many nuclear experts. But it also may be the only chance the US has for real change.
Lucas Ruiz, Oppenheimer Fellow, Oppenheimer Project
“How much is enough?” asked McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, in his Foreign Affairs essay from April 1964. The question unambiguously referred to the number of nuclear weapons in the American arsenal. “The Presidents of the nuclear age,” he wrote, “have all rejected the gamble of limiting our strategic strength in terms of any absolute concept of what is enough.” The suggestion was clear: “[S]uperiority has had different meanings at different stages but seen from the White House its value for peace has never been small,” the “White House” being an allegory for the policymakers like himself.
Five years later, in the October 1969 issue of Foreign Affairs, Bundy published a diametrically sobering essay on the dangers of the nuclear arms race. “[I]n political … terms we have all been wrong to talk of nuclear superiority,” he confessed. “President Nixon was surely right,” he continued, “when he changed the terms of the discussion from ‘superiority’ to ‘sufficiency.’” Indeed, his acknowledgment of Nixon’s semantic pivot reflects his realization of what remains an unresolved tension in American nuclear policy: What is enough?A question that required one to reckon with the fact that where “the risk of escalation has certainly been … a deterrent to action … questions of will and purpose have been more important than questions of numbers.”
Written only a year after the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) had opened for signature; Bundy’s ruminations arrived at the dawn of what some would call the “Golden Age” of nuclear arms control. The 25-year period between Bundy’s essay —1969 — to the end of this golden age —1994 — saw the ratification of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talk (SALT I) agreements in May 1972; the signing of the SALT II agreement in 1979 despite never being ratified by the United States Senate; the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty in 1987; the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) along with President George HW Bush’s “unilateral nuclear initiatives” in July and September of 1991, respectively; and the START II treaty signed in January 1993, which also fell short of ratification and thus never entered force. Although this stream of agreements, if taken in abstraction, may lead one to assume this was an uninterrupted era of nuclear power cooperation, that assumption would be gravely mistaken. The historical record of the late-Carter and, especially, early-Reagan presidencies leaves little room for such misinterpretation. The latter of which revived the concept of nuclear superiority to a nearly cataclysmic end with NATO’s Able Archer war scare of 1983.
Conventional narratives about the arms control era overwhelmingly emphasize the importance that the concept of parity played in stimulating engagement between the United States and the Soviet Union, but parity was a second-order condition of negotiations, not its origin. This has obscured, in both scholarship and policy, the role that Nixon’s reorientation of US nuclear policy around sufficiency, and simultaneous dislodging of superiority–played in deescalating nuclear tensions at the height of the arms race.
As the United States, Russia, and China stand at the precipice of a new nuclear arms competition, and with resurgent calls for the United States to field a “larger — and different — deployed nuclear arsenal to be able to deter both China and Russia in twin crises,” now is the time to recover the operative value of nuclear sufficiency in American foreign relations. Otherwise, those who would have the US expand the arsenal to some ambiguous end reap the rotten world environment their policy advice would wrought. It may just be that what is sufficient is, in fact, all that is necessary.
“Adults in a Room” is a series in collaboration with The Stimson Center’s Reimagining US Grand Strategy program. The series stems from the group’s monthly networking events that call on analysts to gather virtually and hash out a salient topic. It aims to give you a peek into their Zoom room and a deep understanding of the issue at hand in less than the time it takes to sip your morning coffee without the jargon, acronyms, and stuffiness that often come with expertise.
