Biden approves secret plan to deter expansion of China's nuclear arsenal

US President Joe Biden endorsed in March top-secret nuclear strategic plan, which for the first time redirects Washington's strategy to deter the expansion of China's nuclear arsenal, reported in the "New York Times", cited by BTA.

The White House has not said Biden has approved the revised strategy, titled ``Guidelines for the Use of Nuclear Weapons,'' the paper said. An unclassified notification to Congress about the review is expected to be sent before Biden leaves office, according to the same source.

In recent speeches, two senior administration officials were allowed to hint at the strategy review, the newspaper reported. The document is updated approximately once every four years.

So far, the White House has not responded to Reuters' request for comment.

“The president recently issued updated guidance on the use of nuclear weapons to take into account multiple nuclear adversaries,” said earlier this month Vipin Narang, a nuclear strategist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked at the Pentagon before returning to academia. “And in particular”, he added, the armaments guidelines take into account the “significant increase in size and diversity” of China's nuclear arsenal.

In June, National Security Council senior director for arms control and nonproliferation Pranai Wadi also referred to the document, which is the first to look in detail at whether the U.S. is prepared to respond to nuclear crises that erupt simultaneously or sequentially. with a combination of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons.

According to Wadi, the new strategy emphasizes “the need to simultaneously deter Russia, China and North Korea”.

In the past, the likelihood that Washington's adversaries would be able to coordinate nuclear threats to outmaneuver America's nuclear arsenal seemed remote. But the emerging partnership between Russia and China, as well as the conventional weapons that North Korea and Iran are providing Russia for the war in Ukraine, have fundamentally changed Washington's thinking.

Russia and China are already conducting joint military exercises. Intelligence agencies are trying to determine whether Russia is helping the North Korean and Iranian missile programs in return.

The new document is a stark reminder that whoever is sworn in on January 20 next year will face a changed and far more volatile nuclear landscape than the one that existed just three years ago. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, including during the October 2022 crisis, when Biden and his aides, reviewing wiretaps between senior Russian commanders, feared that the possibility of using nuclear weapons it can rise to 50% or even more.

Biden, along with the leaders of Germany and Britain, got China and India to make public statements that there was no place for the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the crisis subsided, at least temporarily.

“It was an important moment,” Richard Haas, a former senior State Department and National Security Council official for several Republican presidents and chairman emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in an interview. “We are dealing with a radicalized Russia; the idea that nuclear weapons will not be used in a conventional conflict is no longer certain.“

The second major change stems from China's nuclear ambitions. The country's nuclear expansion is proceeding at an even faster pace than US intelligence agencies expected two years ago, driven by President Xi Jinping's determination to abandon a decades-long strategy of maintaining a “minimum deterrent” to meet or exceed the size of the arsenals of Washington and Moscow. China's nuclear arsenal is the fastest growing in the world.

Although former US President Donald Trump confidently predicted that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would surrender his nuclear weapons after three one-on-one meetings with him, the exact opposite has happened. Kim has doubled his weapons arsenal and now has more than 60 weapons, according to officials, as well as the materials for many more.

This expansion changed the nature of the North Korean problem - when the country possessed only a few weapons, it could be deterred by missile defenses. But its expanded arsenal is fast approaching that of Pakistan and Israel, and is large enough that it could theoretically coordinate its threats with Moscow and Beijing.

So far during the presidential campaign, the new challenges to America's nuclear strategy have not been the subject of debate. Biden, who has devoted much of his political career to supporting nuclear nonproliferation, has never spoken publicly in detail about how he would respond to the challenges of deterring the expanding forces of China and North Korea. There are also no statements from Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic Party's presidential candidate.

At his last press conference in July, just days before announcing his withdrawal from the Democratic Party nomination, Biden acknowledged that he had adopted a policy of seeking ways to intervene in the broader partnership between China and Russia. However, he refused to give details.