Dire warnings of Russia and China threats challenge ageing US N-arsenal

WASHINGTON: A US congressional commission just released a major new report on the state of the United States’ nuclear arsenal and the threats Washington faces that will shape the future of US nuclear posture — to the tune of billions of dollars — in the decades to come, says a US publication.

The report, “America’s Strategic Posture,” is 160 pages of grim warnings, doom and gloom, and a bevy of recommendations on how to modernize and revamp the US nuclear arsenal. Twelve seasoned foreign-policy experts — six Republican and six Democratic experts — penned the report that concluded the United States was, for the first time in its history, facing “two nuclear peer adversaries for the first time.”

There was an overarching sense of urgency threaded throughout the report, which concluded that the United States wasn’t investing enough in its nuclear arsenal, letting legacy systems go underfunded and neglected, and it needed to consider building and deploying more nuclear weapons.

The United States is in the midst of a “fundamentally different global setting for which we did not plan and we are not well prepared,” Madelyn Creedon, the chair of the commission, said at an event presenting the report’s findings at the Hudson Institute think tank this week.

Creedon warned that the industrial base supporting the US nuclear arsenal “is out of date, unusable, or in some cases, literally falling down.” She said that neither the Pentagon nor the Department of Energy — which plays a key role in managing the US nuclear weapons stockpile — “have enough capacity to meet future requirements.” Among other findings, the commission urged the United States to increase the production of nuclear-capable bombers and submarines, undertake plans to put a portion of the future bomber fleet on continuous alert status, and retain nuclear delivery systems that can be forward-deployed to the European and Asia-Pacific theaters. The commission also urged the United States to bulk up the rest of the US military forces in a bid to further deter Russia and China well before any potential showdown with the US adversaries starts to take on a nuclear angle. The findings could also be viewed as something of a rebuttal to the Biden administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, the executive branch’s own assessment of how it views its nuclear arsenal and future investments. Some powerful Republican lawmakers criticized it for justifying cuts to nuclear modernization programs and not being clear-minded enough about the long-term threats from Russia and China.