Nuclear War With Russia Or China 'Very Real Possibility'

STRATCOM commander sounds the alarm bell, says nuclear war “very real possibility” with Russia or China

JD Heyes 

Throughout the Cold War, the United States and the USSR stared each other down with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.

At the time, it wasn’t clear whose systems were better; while Russia claimed a numerical advantage, top U.S. military and Defense Department officials believed that America had a technological advantage, along with a massive nuclear arsenal as well.

But of course, there were never any nuclear exchanges. Both countries operated under a doctrine known as “MAD” — mutually assured destruction — because Moscow and Washington both possessed a “second-strike” capability. The U.S. and the USSR both possessed land, air, and sea-based nuclear strike platforms, with the seaborne leg via nuclear missile-armed submarines playing the key role of second strike since those were difficult if not impossible to detect.

But one thing the U.S. did not do was invest much in its nuclear arsenal; by comparison, in recent years, the Russians did. And so did the Chinese. 

Now, both rivals field nuclear arsenals and delivery systems that are nearly on par with those field by the Pentagon, and that means nuclear war is far more likely now than at any time in decades, according to the chief of the U.S. Strategic Command, which is responsible for our nuclear forces and responses.

In a column for “Proceedings,” the magazine of the U.S. Naval Institute, Adm. Charles Richard wrote there is a “real possibility” for a regional crisis between either Russia or China that “could escalate quickly to a conflict involving nuclear weapons, if they perceived a conventional loss would threaten the regime or state. (Related: Former DNI John Ratcliffe confirms that China, not Russia, had a very large role interfering with our 2020 election.)

“Consequently, the U.S. military must shift its principal assumption from ‘nuclear employment is not possible’ to ‘nuclear employment is a very real possibility,’ and act to meet and deter that reality,” he wrote. “We cannot approach nuclear deterrence the same way. It must be tailored and evolved for the dynamic environment we face.”

As such, the Defense Department should “establish unity” to deal with “Russian and Chinese aggression, while understanding they require different deterrence approaches, and incorporating that thinking into professional military education at the earliest opportunity.”

While the U.S. has been slow to modernize its nuclear arsenal, Russia and China have invested more heavily and now threaten to “escalate past us,” Richard added.

In an interview with the Washington Times, the four-star admiral said that the U.S. is likely to face “two nuclear-capable peers by the end of this decade.”

“We’ve assumed strategic deterrence will hold in the future, but as the threat environment changes, this may not be the case,” he explained. “We need to be ready to respond to cross-domain threats to ensure the security of our nation and allies by thinking holistically about strategic deterrence in the 21st century.”