The nuclear weapons era is making a comeback, and experts say we're all not paying attention

• Nuclear weapons are poised to once again take center stage, decades after the Cold War ended.
• The US, threatened by a rising China, is being advised to consider an expansion of its nuclear forces.
• Leading experts told BI that few in the public are paying attention the worrying trends.

In 2022, Congress formed the Strategic Posture Commission — a bipartisan team of 12 experts hand-picked to advise the US on what to do with its nuclear weapons.

These are rare. The only other time Congress created such a group was in 2008.

But China was a new concern. Western intelligence says Beijing has since 2020 launched a sudden expansion of its nuclear stockpile, amassing launchers and warheads without explanation.

Alarm bells were ringing in Washington. The Cold War was a stand-off between two nuclear superpowers, and the US now fears China is on a highway to becoming a third.

In its October 2023 final report, the 12-person Commission painted the situation as dire.

"The new global environment is fundamentally different than anything experienced in the past, even in the darkest days of the Cold War," they said.

The commissioners recommended that the US consider its first nuclear expansion since the Cold War, including more warheads, delivery systems, defenses, and launchers.

All of this underlines a deeper anxiety among leading experts that the international arena, fixated for decades on the post-9/11 war on terror, is now tilting relentlessly back to an era of nuclear build-up and brinkmanship.

Business Insider asked 10 nuclear scholars — including four Commissioners — and US-China relations experts on how the US should act.

They agreed that if global trends do not dramatically reverse, the world is poised to live under the shadow of nuclear threat again.

Several prominent arms control scholars have criticized the Commission's report, fearing an arms race that they feel is unnecessary and will escalate the risk of annihilating humanity.

But signs are showing that the US government feels a build-up may have to be considered. In a speech on Thursday, Vipin Narang, the Defense Department's senior official overseeing nuclear policy, said that "we now find ourselves in nothing short of a new nuclear age."

It's a looming future that some experts feel is being dismissed in the US, especially among younger generations born after the Soviet Union's collapse.

"All of the trend lines are going in the wrong direction. So I think we are moving toward a much more dangerous world than it is today," said James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"And it's certainly possible that in the future, it could be as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than the original Cold War," he said.

The Two-Peer Problem

At the crux of the US' concerns is what American leaders call the Two-Peer Problem.

The US is worried it will need to simultaneously counter two of its equals on the nuclear playing field, when it traditionally only had the power to fight one — namely, the Soviet Union.

Beijing is reported to be rapidly increasing its stockpile to an estimated 500 warheads in 2023, up from 400 in 2022.

At that rate, China will have 1,550 warheads — putting it on par with US and Russian capabilities — by 2035.

That would be the Two-Peer Problem: A three-way tie that experts fear will shatter the past basis for nuclear negotiations.

A simple way to understand this dilemma is to look at the numbers.

The US and Russia previously agreed to limit arsenals to 1,550 deployed warheads each.

If China were to reach parity, Washington would want an arsenal matching Moscow's and Beijing's combined, or theoretically 3,100 warheads.

Russia and China are more likely to think the appropriate equilibrium is for everyone to deploy 1,550 warheads each. However, given their close ties, the US is unlikely to accept such an agreement.

With no common number to reach, the three powers will be prone to rushing to gain the upper hand, Acton said.

"Once this arms race really kicks off, I think it's going to be very, very, very hard to stop it," he added.

The race against 2035

By its calculations, Washington now has only 11 years to find and establish a solution by 2035. That's a short window for nuclear programs, which are generally rolled out over decades, not years.

"Decisions need to be made now," wrote the Commission.

The recommendations in its report included putting multiple warheads on one intercontinental ballistic missile (known as MIRV), building more B-21 stealth bombers, and basing nuclear weapons in the Indo-Pacific region.

It also advised the US to look into more tactical nukes, which are lower-yield bombs that Russia stockpiles by the thousands. The report made no recommendations on numbers.

Rose Gottemoeller, one of the 12 Commissioners, emphasized to BI that the report only asked the US to begin planning for an expansion, not to pull the trigger on a build-up now.

"We have the opportunity between now and 2035 to try to get Russia back to the negotiating table and to get China to start talking to us about controlling nuclear weapons," said Gottemoeller, NATO's deputy secretary-general from 2016 to 2019 and the former US chief negotiator with Russia on nuclear programs.

Washington and Moscow held nuclear talks for decades during the Cold War and beyond, but China has not engaged in such discussion so far.

That's unacceptable to the US. "They're not obligated to agree to anything specific, but they are obligated to negotiate in good faith, and they have certainly not done that," said Marshall Billingslea, former US special presidential envoy for arms control and one of the 12 Commissioners.

Russia, meanwhile, spent the last two years making nuclear threats over the war in Ukraine.

To scholars supporting a US nuclear expansion, the situation has deteriorated so drastically that the time to simply hope for negotiations has passed. America must act, they told BI.

"I think when the United States is strong, our adversaries think: 'Okay, this is dangerous. We don't want to get into a conflict with the United States,'" Matt Kroenig, a professor at Georgetown University's government studies department. He was also one of the 12 Commissioners.

"When the United States is weak, that's when you see aggression and violence," he added.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry and embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment sent by BI.

Not all experts are convinced

Scholars who disagree said the US is looking at the Two-Peer Problem incorrectly.

Nuclear weapons are widely understood as the ultimate defense against existential threats like invasion, and these experts say the US can maintain that even if it has fewer nuclear weapons.

"We should focus on keeping our nuclear arsenal survivable, safe, secure, and reliable," said Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "We don't need to compete with them numerically. It won't enhance deterrence to do so."

Francesca Giovannini, executive director of the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University's Kennedy School, said that while official US-China nuclear talks are frozen, academics and non-governmental organizations are still trying to keep the dialogue flowing.

However, she told BI that the White House's past moves, such as withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, have sowed doubt in Beijing that the US will keep to its arms control commitments.

"These examples come back often in dialogue," she said. "In China, arms control is increasingly seen as a mechanism devised by the United States to constrain China's rising military power."

That has made talk of arms control an increasingly dangerous line for Chinese experts to defend in the domestic debate, Giovannini added.

"For many, the United States is a non-reliable interlocutor and a political mess, especially Congress," she said.

Lyle Goldstein, director of the China Initiative at Brown University, said that in China, senior strategists already believe Beijing's nuclear build-up is a response to US aggression, not the other way round.

"I said: 'Are you seriously thinking about limited nuclear war?' And they said yes, emphatically yes. They said: 'We are thinking about it because you are thinking about it,'" Goldstein said.

What will it cost taxpayers?

Greg Weaver, a former deputy director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the fundamental argument for a nuclear expansion is that the US must show that it can credibly defend itself and its allies.

"If someone launched a large-scale attack on the United States, there's no question we would annihilate them in response," said Weaver, an advisor to the Commission.

"But that's not our strategy. We extend nuclear deterrence to about 35 countries in Europe and Asia. Credible extended deterrence requires different capabilities than it does to just deter attacks directly on the United States," he added.

Some scholars like Weaver have championed a few additions to US nuclear forces, such as a cruise missile that can deliver a warhead from a submarine.

But those additional programs come at a cost. The US is already estimated to spend $1.5 trillion in the next 30 years on modernizing its aging nuclear forces — which most experts agree must be done.

Goldstein of Brown University fears that money will be siphoned from other pressing domestic interests.

"Schools and hospitals and high-speed rails and all the things that we'd like to have in our country. We don't have them. One reason is because we're spending trillions on nuclear weapons," he said.

David Kearn, who studied missiles for RAND and advised the Defense Secretary's office from 2016 to 2017, believes nuclear spending will distract from conventional weapons development.

In July, a congressional review found that the US was already unprepared to fight a war against either China or Russia.

"They're saying the sea-launched cruise missile would be $12 billion. That could be almost two attack submarines. I'll take the two attack subs, please," said Kearn, now an associate professor of politics at St. John's University.

Analysts like Weaver say the Pentagon only spends a small fraction of its annual defense budget on nuclear weapons, and that the US can reasonably achieve a more powerful nuclear deterrent with prudent spending.

"We can do it if it's the priority," said Rebeccah Heinrichs, one of the 12 Commissioners and director of the Hudson Institute's Keystone Defense Initiative. "But if climate change, for example, competes with the priority to maintain the peace and deter China and Russia, it will prevent us from doing it."

'That's ancient history'

Despite growing signs of an uncontrollable arms race, several experts said they feel public focus on the issue has been strangely absent.

"I think it's generational," Kroenig said. "Even when I was in graduate school in the early 2000s, I had many of my advisors saying: 'Nuclear weapons? That's a Cold War issue. That's ancient history. Study something relevant like terrorism or insurgency.'"

Giovannini said organizations studying nuclear weapons are struggling to recruit young analysts and students. "They are more interested in the artificial intelligence space than nuclear weapons," she said.

As 2035 approaches, experts can see a future with three nuclear superpowers and almost zero negotiation.

"I'm afraid unless we can get talks on track, we will be back to where we were in the 1950s," said Gottemoeller. "When governments simply weren't willing to talk to each other about this."

"And what did it produce?" she said. "A severe crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when we came to the brink of nuclear annihilation."