New Nuclear Arms Race Pits U.S. Against Both Russia and China
After a decadeslong hiatus, the weapons have surged back to the forefront of global politics.
The new nuclear race has begun. But unlike during the Cold War, the U.S. must prepare for two peer rivals rather than one—at a time when it has lost its clear industrial and economic edge.
China, which long possessed just a small nuclear force, is catching up fast, while Russia is developing a variety of new-generation systems aimed at American cities.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has already used nuclear saber-rattling to throttle American support for Ukraine. He has deployed nuclear weapons to Belarus and, in recent weeks, tested a nuclear-powered missile and a nuclear-powered submarine drone that he claims are impervious to American defenses.
While Russia and the U.S. are still abiding by some arms-controls limits, such as the New Start treaty that expires in February, China, unconstrained by any commitments, is quietly but rapidly leaping ahead. According to American estimates, Beijing will reach rough parity with the U.S. in deployed nuclear warheads by the mid-2030s.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping for the first time showcased China’s nuclear triad—its land, sea and air-launched ballistic nuclear missiles—at a Beijing parade honoring the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan in September. Putin, sitting to his right atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, took note. So did North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, sitting to his left.
The growing bond between Moscow and Beijing—onetime rivals who neared the brink of a nuclear exchange during a border conflict in 1969—has already created an unprecedented level of strategic uncertainty for the U.S. and its European and Asian allies. That wariness is compounded by doubts among Washington’s allies about President Trump’s commitment to honor mutual-defense obligations.
“The movement now is towards building up nuclear arsenals, not reducing them,” said Matthew Kroenig, director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center and a former Pentagon official. “We’re entering the third nuclear age that is going to look a lot more like Cold War than the 1990s and the 2000s.”
A bipartisan congressional commission on the U.S.’s strategic posture, on which Kroenig served, recommended in 2023 that the U.S. should consider expanding its nuclear arsenal for the first time in decades because of China’s buildup. Trump has said he seeks to cut back nuclear weapons but that he can’t do so if America’s rivals don’t disarm, too. Last month, he also called for the resumption of nuclear testing.
The U.S., which hasn’t conducted an explosive nuclear test since 1992, currently owns 5,117 nuclear warheads, including 3,700 retired in stockpiles, compared with Russia’s 5,459 and China’s 600, according to the Federation of American Scientists. North Korea, a new entrant to the nuclear club that last year sealed a formal military alliance with Russia, possesses an estimated 50 warheads and is heavily investing in intercontinental missile and submarine capabilities that can strike the American mainland.
The U.S. has been slow to react to these new threats. “Our entire nuclear modernization program was sized around the belief that we’re going to continue to have further cuts with Russia, and that China and North Korea wouldn’t pose challenges for the U.S. posture. All those assumptions have turned out to be wrong,” said Vipin Narang, director of the Center for Nuclear Security Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who oversaw U.S. strategic capabilities at the Pentagon during the Biden administration.
“If there is a regional conflict in Europe and China decides to take Taiwan, or vice versa, we will be stretched really thin,” he added. “These are the kinds of scenarios we are really unprepared for.”
Xi has ordered the Chinese military to be ready for a military takeover of Taiwan, if necessary, by 2027, according to U.S. intelligence, though it doesn’t mean that he will pursue this soon. American and NATO military commanders say that the most probable scenario in case war over Taiwan erupts is the so-called “simultaneity problem”: Chinese operations would trigger Russian military action against one or more North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, and possibly a North Korean invasion of South Korea.
Currently, China isn’t interested in any arms-control negotiations because it wants to catch up with the U.S. and Russia, and says that the two biggest nuclear powers should cut down their own arsenals first. While Russia has used nuclear blackmail to compensate for the weakness of its conventional forces, as demonstrated through the nearly four years of war against a resilient Ukraine, Chinese strategists say that an inverse calculus is in play in Asia.
“For China, the point is that because the U.S. is afraid that they might lose in a conventional war, some people are suggesting using a nuclear weapon against China in the Taiwan Strait,” said retired Senior Col. Zhou Bo, a former director at the Center for Security Cooperation in China’s Ministry of Defense who is now a senior fellow at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. “China should increase its arsenal—not to reach parity, but to the extent that the U.S. will never even dare to think about using nuclear weapons against China. And then, in a conventional war, China can win.”
This year’s brief war between Pakistan, which used Chinese weapons, and India, which lost at least one French-made Rafale jet, reinforced this sense of confidence about Beijing’s rising military might. “The U.S. doesn’t really have the capacity to engage in a big-scale war in Asia,” said Tang Xiaoyang, the chair of international relations at Tsinghua University. “The U.S. realizes that if there is a war, China is currently quite confident of defeating the U.S. due to its strong industrial capacity.”
While the U.S., Russia and China have all invested in more-sophisticated missiles and other nuclear delivery systems in recent years, American and Russian nuclear warheads date back several decades. The U.S. has been modernizing its warheads with subcritical testing that produces zero nuclear yield.
Trump raised the prospect of renewed testing of warheads after intelligence reports that Russia, at its Novaya Zemlya archipelago, and China, at its Lop Nur site, have been conducting supercritical tests that create a self-sustained chain reaction in an underground containment vessel but stop well short of a full yield.
Trump first spoke on the matter—just before an October summit with Xi—after the much-publicized Russian testing of the Burevestnik missile, which because of a nuclear reactor aboard could stay airborne for months, and of the Poseidon nuclear-powered underwater drone that is designed to sneak up to the coast and wipe out entire cities. Since then, Trump also shelved the idea of providing Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles that could strike strategic sites deep inside Russia.
“Putin’s pronouncements have to be answered. When the war in Ukraine started in 2022, there was a huge disbalance of fear, with Putin using those nuclear threats, veiled and not so veiled, and the West was pretty much paralyzed,” said Serhii Plokhy, a professor at Harvard University and author of “The Nuclear Age.” “There has to be a response. If there is no response, Putin is winning.”
Putin this month instructed his own Defense Ministry to study the possibility of resuming nuclear testing, though he stopped short of publicly ordering concrete preparations. “It’s evident that the Russians always pull the nuclear card when things are not good for them. It’s strategic communication,” said a senior Western official.
Russia hasn’t tested nuclear warheads with a full-yield explosion since the Soviet Union’s collapse, and it wasn’t clear to what kind of future testing Putin—or Trump—were referring. The Nevada National Security Site where most of the previous 1,054 explosive U.S. nuclear tests occurred would need between two and three years of technical preparations for the resumption of full-yield testing.
Despite all the hype, Russia’s Burevestnik and Poseidon wonder-weapons aren’t fully operational, and have more psychological rather than military utility, said Fabian Hoffmann, an expert on nuclear weapons and missile technology at the University of Oslo.
“For the Russians, a lot of the motivation is just the fear factor, getting us to talk about this scary missile,” Hoffmann said. “It is eating up their research and development budget. It’s a Russian waste of money, in essence. The Chinese have a much smarter approach: They’re just building warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles, and aren’t trying to build anything weird and exotic.”
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
The new nuclear race has begun. But unlike during the Cold War, the U.S. must prepare for two peer rivals rather than one—at a time when it has lost its clear industrial and economic edge.
China, which long possessed just a small nuclear force, is catching up fast, while Russia is developing a variety of new-generation systems aimed at American cities.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has already used nuclear saber-rattling to throttle American support for Ukraine. He has deployed nuclear weapons to Belarus and, in recent weeks, tested a nuclear-powered missile and a nuclear-powered submarine drone that he claims are impervious to American defenses.
While Russia and the U.S. are still abiding by some arms-controls limits, such as the New Start treaty that expires in February, China, unconstrained by any commitments, is quietly but rapidly leaping ahead. According to American estimates, Beijing will reach rough parity with the U.S. in deployed nuclear warheads by the mid-2030s.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping for the first time showcased China’s nuclear triad—its land, sea and air-launched ballistic nuclear missiles—at a Beijing parade honoring the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan in September. Putin, sitting to his right atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, took note. So did North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, sitting to his left.
The growing bond between Moscow and Beijing—onetime rivals who neared the brink of a nuclear exchange during a border conflict in 1969—has already created an unprecedented level of strategic uncertainty for the U.S. and its European and Asian allies. That wariness is compounded by doubts among Washington’s allies about President Trump’s commitment to honor mutual-defense obligations.
“The movement now is towards building up nuclear arsenals, not reducing them,” said Matthew Kroenig, director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center and a former Pentagon official. “We’re entering the third nuclear age that is going to look a lot more like Cold War than the 1990s and the 2000s.”
A bipartisan congressional commission on the U.S.’s strategic posture, on which Kroenig served, recommended in 2023 that the U.S. should consider expanding its nuclear arsenal for the first time in decades because of China’s buildup. Trump has said he seeks to cut back nuclear weapons but that he can’t do so if America’s rivals don’t disarm, too. Last month, he also called for the resumption of nuclear testing.
The U.S., which hasn’t conducted an explosive nuclear test since 1992, currently owns 5,117 nuclear warheads, including 3,700 retired in stockpiles, compared with Russia’s 5,459 and China’s 600, according to the Federation of American Scientists. North Korea, a new entrant to the nuclear club that last year sealed a formal military alliance with Russia, possesses an estimated 50 warheads and is heavily investing in intercontinental missile and submarine capabilities that can strike the American mainland.
The U.S. has been slow to react to these new threats. “Our entire nuclear modernization program was sized around the belief that we’re going to continue to have further cuts with Russia, and that China and North Korea wouldn’t pose challenges for the U.S. posture. All those assumptions have turned out to be wrong,” said Vipin Narang, director of the Center for Nuclear Security Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who oversaw U.S. strategic capabilities at the Pentagon during the Biden administration.
“If there is a regional conflict in Europe and China decides to take Taiwan, or vice versa, we will be stretched really thin,” he added. “These are the kinds of scenarios we are really unprepared for.”
Xi has ordered the Chinese military to be ready for a military takeover of Taiwan, if necessary, by 2027, according to U.S. intelligence, though it doesn’t mean that he will pursue this soon. American and NATO military commanders say that the most probable scenario in case war over Taiwan erupts is the so-called “simultaneity problem”: Chinese operations would trigger Russian military action against one or more North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, and possibly a North Korean invasion of South Korea.
Currently, China isn’t interested in any arms-control negotiations because it wants to catch up with the U.S. and Russia, and says that the two biggest nuclear powers should cut down their own arsenals first. While Russia has used nuclear blackmail to compensate for the weakness of its conventional forces, as demonstrated through the nearly four years of war against a resilient Ukraine, Chinese strategists say that an inverse calculus is in play in Asia.
“For China, the point is that because the U.S. is afraid that they might lose in a conventional war, some people are suggesting using a nuclear weapon against China in the Taiwan Strait,” said retired Senior Col. Zhou Bo, a former director at the Center for Security Cooperation in China’s Ministry of Defense who is now a senior fellow at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. “China should increase its arsenal—not to reach parity, but to the extent that the U.S. will never even dare to think about using nuclear weapons against China. And then, in a conventional war, China can win.”
This year’s brief war between Pakistan, which used Chinese weapons, and India, which lost at least one French-made Rafale jet, reinforced this sense of confidence about Beijing’s rising military might. “The U.S. doesn’t really have the capacity to engage in a big-scale war in Asia,” said Tang Xiaoyang, the chair of international relations at Tsinghua University. “The U.S. realizes that if there is a war, China is currently quite confident of defeating the U.S. due to its strong industrial capacity.”
While the U.S., Russia and China have all invested in more-sophisticated missiles and other nuclear delivery systems in recent years, American and Russian nuclear warheads date back several decades. The U.S. has been modernizing its warheads with subcritical testing that produces zero nuclear yield.
Trump raised the prospect of renewed testing of warheads after intelligence reports that Russia, at its Novaya Zemlya archipelago, and China, at its Lop Nur site, have been conducting supercritical tests that create a self-sustained chain reaction in an underground containment vessel but stop well short of a full yield.
Trump first spoke on the matter—just before an October summit with Xi—after the much-publicized Russian testing of the Burevestnik missile, which because of a nuclear reactor aboard could stay airborne for months, and of the Poseidon nuclear-powered underwater drone that is designed to sneak up to the coast and wipe out entire cities. Since then, Trump also shelved the idea of providing Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles that could strike strategic sites deep inside Russia.
“Putin’s pronouncements have to be answered. When the war in Ukraine started in 2022, there was a huge disbalance of fear, with Putin using those nuclear threats, veiled and not so veiled, and the West was pretty much paralyzed,” said Serhii Plokhy, a professor at Harvard University and author of “The Nuclear Age.” “There has to be a response. If there is no response, Putin is winning.”
Putin this month instructed his own Defense Ministry to study the possibility of resuming nuclear testing, though he stopped short of publicly ordering concrete preparations. “It’s evident that the Russians always pull the nuclear card when things are not good for them. It’s strategic communication,” said a senior Western official.
Russia hasn’t tested nuclear warheads with a full-yield explosion since the Soviet Union’s collapse, and it wasn’t clear to what kind of future testing Putin—or Trump—were referring. The Nevada National Security Site where most of the previous 1,054 explosive U.S. nuclear tests occurred would need between two and three years of technical preparations for the resumption of full-yield testing.
Despite all the hype, Russia’s Burevestnik and Poseidon wonder-weapons aren’t fully operational, and have more psychological rather than military utility, said Fabian Hoffmann, an expert on nuclear weapons and missile technology at the University of Oslo.
“For the Russians, a lot of the motivation is just the fear factor, getting us to talk about this scary missile,” Hoffmann said. “It is eating up their research and development budget. It’s a Russian waste of money, in essence. The Chinese have a much smarter approach: They’re just building warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles, and aren’t trying to build anything weird and exotic.”
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
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