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In a classified document approved in March, the president ordered U. S. forces to prepare for imaginable coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea.
By David E. Sanger
David E. Sanger has been writing about US nuclear strategy for the New York Times for about four decades.
President Biden in March approved a highly classified nuclear strategic plan for the United States that, for the first time, reorients the United States’ deterrence strategy toward the immediate expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal.
The move comes as the Pentagon estimates that China’s stockpile will rival those of the United States and Russia in length and diversity over the next decade.
The White House never announced that Biden had approved the revised strategy, called the “Nuclear Roadmap,” which also aims to prepare the United States for imaginable situations of coordinated nuclear demand by China, Russia and North Korea. The document, updated about every four years, is so highly classified that there are no electronic copies, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.
But in recent speeches, two senior administration officials were allowed to track the update, in simple, carefully contained sentences, ahead of a more detailed, unclassified presentation to Congress expected before Biden leaves office.
“The president recently issued updated rules on the use of nuclear weapons to account for various nuclear-armed adversaries,” Vipin Narang, an MIT nuclear researcher and strategist who served at the Pentagon, said earlier this month before returning to academia. “And in particular,” he added, the weapons direction explains the “significant increase in the length and diversity” of China’s nuclear arsenal.
In June, Pranay Vaddi, senior director of arms control and nonproliferation at the National Security Council, also referenced the document, the first to read in detail whether the United States is prepared to respond to crises. nuclear cannons that explode or sequentially, with a mix of nuclear and non-nuclear cannons.
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