{"id":14151,"date":"2024-08-23T00:53:17","date_gmt":"2024-08-23T00:53:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/diigital.press\/?p=11354"},"modified":"2024-08-23T00:53:17","modified_gmt":"2024-08-23T00:53:17","slug":"president-joe-biden-ordered-u-s-forces-to-prepare-for-possible-coordinated-nuclear-confrontations-with-russia-china-and-north-korea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/otrxio.com\/?p=14151","title":{"rendered":"President Joe Biden ordered U.S. forces to prepare for possible coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea."},"content":{"rendered":"

President Joe Biden approved in March a highly classified nuclear strategic plan for the United States that, for the first time, reorients America\u2019s deterrent strategy to focus on China\u2019s rapid expansion in its nuclear arsenal.<\/p>\n

Pentagon Believes China Stockpiles Nuclear Arms<\/h3>\n

The shift comes as the Pentagon believes China\u2019s stockpiles will rival the size and diversity of the United States\u2019 and Russia\u2019s over the next decade.<\/p>\n

The White House never announced that Biden had approved the revised strategy, called the \u201cNuclear\u00a0Employment<\/strong>\u00a0Guidance,\u201d which also seeks, for the first time, to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from China, Russia and North Korea. The document, updated every four years or so, is so highly classified that there are no electronic copies, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a select few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.<\/p>\n

But in recent speeches, two senior administration officials were allowed to allude to the change \u2014 in carefully constrained, single sentences \u2014 ahead of a more detailed, unclassified notification to Congress expected before Biden leaves office.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe president recently issued updated nuclear-weapons employment guidance to account for multiple nuclear-armed adversaries,\u201d Vipin Narang, a nuclear strategist at MIT who served in the Pentagon, said this month before returning to academia. \u201cAnd in particular,\u201d he added, the weapons guidance accounted for \u201cthe significant increase in the size and diversity\u201d of China\u2019s nuclear arsenal.<\/p>\n

In June, the National Security Council\u2019s senior director for arms control and nonproliferation, Pranay Vaddi, also referred to the document, the first to examine in detail whether the United States is prepared to respond to nuclear crises that break out simultaneously or sequentially, with a combination of nuclear and nonnuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

The new strategy emphasizes \u201cthe need to deter Russia, the PRC and North Korea simultaneously,\u201d Vaddi said, using the acronym for the People\u2019s Republic of China.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In the past, the likelihood that American adversaries could coordinate nuclear threats to outmaneuver the American nuclear arsenal seemed remote. But the emerging partnership between Russia and China, and the conventional arms North Korea and Iran are providing to Russia for the war in Ukraine have fundamentally changed Washington\u2019s thinking.<\/p>\n

Russia and China Have Joint Military Exercises<\/h3>\n

Already, Russia and China are conducting military exercises together. Intelligence agencies are trying to determine whether Russia is aiding the North Korean and Iranian missile programs in return.<\/p>\n

The new document is a stark reminder that whoever is sworn in next Jan. 20 will confront a changed and far more volatile nuclear landscape than the one that existed just three years ago. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine, including during a crisis in October 2022, when Biden and his aides, looking at intercepts of conversations between senior Russian commanders, feared the likelihood of nuclear use might rise to 50% or even higher.<\/p>\n

Biden, along with leaders of Germany and Britain, got China and India to make public statements that there was no role for the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the crisis abated, at least temporarily.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was an important moment,\u201d Richard N. Haass, a former senior State Department and National Security Council official for several Republican presidents, and the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in an interview. \u201cWe are dealing with a Russia that is radicalized; the idea that nukes wouldn\u2019t be used in a conventional conflict is not longer a safe assumption.\u201d<\/p>\n

China\u2019s Nuclear Ambitions Rise<\/h3>\n

The second big change arises from China\u2019s nuclear ambitions. The country\u2019s nuclear expansion is running at an even faster pace than American intelligence officials anticipated two years ago, driven by President Xi Jinping\u2019s determination to scrap the decades-long strategy of maintaining a \u201cminimum deterrent\u201d to reach or exceed the size of the U.S. and Russian arsenals. China\u2019s nuclear complex is now the fastest-growing in the world.<\/p>\n

Although former President Donald Trump confidently predicted that Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, would surrender his nuclear weapons after their three in-person meetings, the opposite happened. Kim has doubled down, and now has more than 60 weapons, officials estimate, and the fuel for many more.<\/p>\n

That expansion has changed the nature of the North Korean challenge: When the country possessed just a handful of weapons, it could be deterred by missile defenses. But its expanded arsenal is fast approaching the size of Pakistan\u2019s and Israel\u2019s, and it is large enough that it could, in theory, coordinate threats with Russia and China.<\/p>\n

It was only a matter of time before a fundamentally different nuclear environment began to alter American war plans and strategy, officials say.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is our responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we hoped or wished it would be,\u201d Narang said as he was leaving the Pentagon. \u201cIt is possible that we will one day look back and see the quarter-century after the Cold War as nuclear intermission.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new challenge is \u201cthe real possibility of collaboration and even collusion between our nuclear-armed adversaries,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n