Lt. Col. Thomas Hammerle/U.S. Army
The United States National Security Strategy explains that the nation has entered a decisive decade — not only for itself but also the world. The current era of strategic competition is characterized by the reemergence of a geopolitical contest between powerful states over the shape of the future global order. After World War II, the Allies established a rules-based international order rooted in cooperative values and predicated on a framework of diplomatic and economic rules, led and enforced by like-minded nations. This system has enabled decades of prosperity for all nations that have elected to participate, but it is now under stress by revisionist nations. North Korea, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia are each intent on changing the international order to achieve their national ambitions.
The changing strategic environment has created a “wicked deterrence” challenge that will test the U.S. and its Allies and Partners. The current international order dissatisfies those revisionist states because they see it as a threat to their own national objectives. Their ambitions pose a direct strategic challenge to the continued security of the U.S. and its Allies and Partners because these nations are increasingly capable and willing to use force as a coercion mechanism. Russia openly flouts international laws and norms — including its own commitment to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum — by invading Ukraine, violating its sovereignty and attempting to annex territory by force. The PRC seeks to establish its own sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific region that excludes the U.S. and Western influence while attempting to resolve territorial disputes through coercion and threatening behavior. The most serious component of these strategic challenges for the U.S. is the modernization and expansion of both the PRC’s and Russia’s nuclear arsenals. For the first time in its history, the U.S. is simultaneously facing two adversarial nuclear peers whose aspirations directly challenge U.S. national values and threaten U.S. Allies.
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Wicked Deterrence Challenge
A “wicked problem” is difficult to solve because of its complexity, incomplete and changing information, multiple stakeholders, competing and conflicting objectives, clash of cultures, or the unprecedented or novel nature of the situation. Deterrence, by its very nature as a function of influence over leadership decision-making, is a wicked problem. Numerous factors can impact leadership decisions, making the application of deterrence strategy more art than science. As Keith Payne, cofounder of the Virginia-based National Institute for Public Policy, wrote, “There are few, if any, universal constants in this regard; instead, there is a wide variety of operating factors, some seen, others unseen, that can vary greatly across time, place, and opponent, and may be decisive in determining if and how deterrence will function.”
The emergence of the multilateral strategic environment and the need to simultaneously deter many nuclear actors while continuing to assure Allies require the U.S. to rethink its deterrence policy. How does deterrence policy need to adapt to address the changing multiactor environment? To answer this question, analysts must start with an understanding of the strategic environment, including a deep understanding of nations and the leaders the U.S. seeks to deter. While this understanding will never be perfect, it will reduce ignorance and provide a basis for designing a tailored deterrence policy.
People’s Republic of China
The PRC’s meteoric rise has been motivated by its perceived need to reshape the international order. While former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping articulated the PRC’s strategy as one of patience — the “hide and bide” strategy — Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping has abandoned this approach, instead seizing the opportunity to achieve his Chinese Dream of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” However, Xi views the current world order as an unacceptable impediment to the PRC’s geopolitical ambitions and the U.S. as a direct threat to its national security. Beijing views Western and particularly Washington’s influence in the Indo-Pacific as a violation of its right to act as the regional hegemon and an impediment to its claims about Taiwan. Xi envisions the PRC as the rightful preeminent Asian and global power. Xi’s bolder, more confrontational strategy has provoked responses both from regional nations concerned about their sovereignty and security and global nations invested in the current rules-based international order.
The CCP has repositioned itself politically, economically and militarily to better enable it to achieve its aspirations. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has undertaken a holistic military modernization of both its conventional and nuclear capabilities. Modernization efforts have been underway for decades, but they have increased to an alarming pace under Xi’s leadership. The CCP has sought to develop an ability to forcibly expel Western forces and ultimately prohibit their reentry into the region to secure its ambitions. Nuclear weapons forces are “a strategic pillar of China’s great power status,” the linchpin in excluding U.S. and Western influence, and ultimately serve as the backstop to achieving its ambitions.
The PLA’s rapid development of its nuclear arsenal is the fastest peacetime expansion of a nuclear arsenal the world has witnessed, going from just a few hundred weapons at the end of the Cold War era to a projected 1,500 by 2035 at its current pace. These developments will match, and in some areas qualitatively exceed, equivalency with the United States. Xi has stated that he believes a robust nuclear weapons program is critical to the CCP’s ability to counter the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific. To this end, the CCP is investing in and expanding the number of its land-, sea- and air-based nuclear delivery platforms and constructing the infrastructure necessary to support this major expansion.
The PRC’s nuclear strategy has been relatively consistent since it first acquired nuclear weapons in 1964, relying on a minimum deterrence strategy made credible by a small nuclear arsenal capable of delivering a secure second strike. Beijing’s declared no-first-use policy further reinforced this public commitment to maintaining a nonaggressive position. However, the CCP’s rapid nuclear expansion calls into question whether the PLA is still committed to this strategy. In his testimony before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, Gen. Anthony Cotton, Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, articulated this point, stating, “The PRC’s actions are wholly inconsistent with its long-professed policy of minimum deterrence.” The expansion of the CCP’s nuclear arsenal opens myriad possibilities of ways it could adapt its strategy to both deter and coerce other nations. However, due to a lack of transparency and an unwillingness to engage in dialogue, it is unclear what the PRC’s intentions are.
The discovery of 300 new potential intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos brought into sharp relief the extent of the CCP’s nuclear modernization and expansion. When complete, these silos will provide the PRC with persistent readiness and the ability to conduct extremely rapid launch sequences. In addition to investing in fixed silos, the PLA Rocket Force is investing in road mobiles and expanding the number of launchers and crews in each unit at an unprecedented rate.
At the same time the CCP is modernizing its nuclear capabilities, it is modernizing the command and control infrastructure to support it. Investments in ground-based large phased-array radars and the ability to detect ballistic missile launches with geostationary satellites have provided the PRC with a comprehensive early warning capability. These capabilities make credible the PRC’s desire to shift to a “launch on warning” nuclear posture, increasing the potential for miscalculation.
Russia
The challenges posed by Russia to the rules-based international order have been on full display since at least 2008, with Russia’s invasion of Georgia, and again in 2022 when President Vladimir Putin began his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine to halt Kyiv’s economic and cultural progress toward the West. Putin views the U.S.-backed rules-based international order as a threat to the Russian way of life. It is his intent to renew the “Russkiy Mir,” the Russian world, and restore Russian prestige and cultural and political influence in the vein of previous Russian empires.
The current revisionist and irredentist narrative in Moscow argues that Russia is a victim of U.S.-European hegemony and is besieged by NATO expansion in its periphery, a direct threat to the goal of reestablishing the Russian world. The war in Ukraine is a direct result of this perceived threat. Non-NATO and non-European Union states with strong relationships with the West, in general, have been less susceptible or receptive to Russian influence, thereby diminishing Russia’s status in its near abroad. At the prospect of further NATO enlargement, Putin felt threatened to the point of taking belligerent action. According to Dmitri Trenin, a member of Russia’s Foreign and Defense Policy Council, “What Russia craves is respect. It does not want to be a junior partner — it wants to be an equal.”
Despite significant initial gains in Ukraine, the Russian war effort has endured countless tactical, operational and strategic setbacks and has begun to show clear signs of devolution into a protracted slog reminiscent of the Korean War in the 1950s. A significant portion of Russia’s conventional capability has been degraded and destroyed by the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which could increase Putin’s reliance on nuclear capabilities for Russia’s defense.
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The continued use of nuclear saber-rattling by Putin and other Russian officials has effectively deterred Western intervention and heavily influenced the type of military assistance the West is willing to provide to Ukraine and undermined Ukrainian resistance. As evidenced by steadily increasing economic and material support from NATO, the effectiveness of these nuclear threats is eroding. Putin’s legitimate reliance on nuclear weapons, however, coupled with robust nuclear signaling should not be ignored or dismissed out of hand because Russia’s nuclear weapons arsenal remains a significant existential threat to the U.S. and its Allies and Partners throughout Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
The capability and credibility of Russia’s strategic and tactical nuclear forces make them a serious concern that cannot be ignored. Russia continues to invest substantial resources to expand and modernize its strategic and nonstrategic nuclear capabilities. Russia’s modernization plan, which has been in the works for over a decade, includes improving each leg of its triad of nuclear delivery systems and developing new nuclear capabilities.
In addition to modernizing its legacy systems, Russia is developing and improving its hypersonic and other novel delivery systems. Furthermore, Russia maintains over 2,000 non-treaty accountable — often referred to as tactical or nonstrategic — nuclear weapons that provide diverse and flexible use and deterrence options. This very threat of tactical nuclear weapons has caused NATO nations to revitalize focus on both their conventional and nuclear capabilities to ensure that the Alliance possesses a credible deterrent. Both Russia’s strategic and tactical nuclear weapons are backed by a body of doctrine that explicitly lays out the conditions for nuclear use, including possible first use in response to threats to the “existence of the state.”
North Korea
North Korea has posed a consistent threat to the U.S. and its Allies and Partners since the 1953 armistice. The nature of this threat has oscillated between moderate and acute but has remained consistently hostile. The persistence of the threat and more acute emerging challenges have unfortunately allowed some to become numb to the true severity and magnitude of what a conflict with North Korea could mean for the region and the U.S. Conversely, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un does not waver in his focus on the U.S. as the perceived preeminent existential threat to his nation. To secure his power and protect his regime, Kim continues to invest in and grow North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. The growth of Pyongyang’s nuclear power goes beyond security. Jung H. Pak, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., observed, “[Kim] has elevated and embedded nuclear weapons in both the popular consciousness and the ideological, physical, and cultural landscape, enshrining them in North Korea’s constitution and has effectively linked them to the country’s perception of prosperity.”
Along with advancing weapons development, North Korea has continued to advance its nuclear program, accelerating its testing program while refining its nuclear doctrine. North Korea enshrines its nuclear doctrine into law, the most recent update occurring in 2022 with the establishment of the State Policy and Nuclear Forces. This law served as an update to the 2013 Law on Consolidating Position of Nuclear Weapons State. While the 2022 law remains consistent with the earlier version in affirming the role of nuclear weapons in deterring aggression or responding if deterrence should fail, it also outlined the situations that could warrant a preemptive nuclear attack. Most concerning, the 2022 North Korean law details the potential for an automatic nuclear response — often referred to as a “dead man’s hand” mechanism — should military commanders be unable to communicate with leadership in Pyongyang during a conflict. This severely complicates the deterrence and escalation management strategies of the U.S. and its Allies.
Estimating the size of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is exceedingly difficult, as the regime is even less transparent than that of the PRC. That stated, North Korea is thought to have anywhere from 35 to 65 warheads, with the ability to add up to 18 more warheads each year. The international community should no longer consider Kim a proxy of the CCP or a buffer state puppet and must not ignore North Korea’s unique national objectives.
A Complex Strategic Environment
North Korea, the PRC and Russia represent primary nuclear security concerns for the U.S. and its Allies because of those states’ abilities to threaten existentially and coerce effectively. In the developing multiactor environment, U.S. relationships with each of these states do not happen in a vacuum. The strategic environment contains other nuclear weapons states, including the United Kingdom and France. India and Pakistan are de facto nuclear weapons states, as they are not signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), nor are they recognized as sanctioned nuclear weapons states by the NPT, as they acquired their capability after 1970. There are also additional nations that may desire nuclear weapons — adversaries such as Iran.
For its part, the U.S. extends deterrence with its nuclear umbrella through collective defense treaties to the 32 nations of NATO, as well as Australia, Japan and South Korea. Thus, the deterrent relationships are never bilateral, as is often misremembered about the Cold War era, but instead contain the security concerns of multiple actors.
Deterrence has been the cornerstone of the U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) since defense strategist Bernard Brodie declared, “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on, its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.” As the U.S. and its Allies and Partners traverse what the NSS has declared as a decisive decade, the nature of deterrence strategy is changing. The emergence of a multiactor strategic environment with two nuclear-peer adversaries and numerous other proliferation challenges poses a truly wicked problem that requires a concerted effort to unravel. Given the complexity of the problem, the best that can honestly be expected is probably an increase of understanding and a reduction of uncertainty. This begins with understanding each unique adversary and the relationships that influence strategic decision-making with that state, and evaluating which circumstances can maintain a U.S. and allied advantage.
This article originally published in the Joint Force Quarterly, Issue 112, 1st Quarter 2024 magazine edition. It has been edited to fit Sentry’s format. Access the original version at https://ndupress.ndu.edu/JFQ/Joint-Force-Quarterly-112.aspx.