[American
officials largely blame the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, saying his
intransigence has stymied efforts to build on a 2010 arms control treaty and
further shrink the arsenals of the two largest nuclear powers. Some blame the
Chinese, who are looking for a technological edge to keep the United States at bay. And some blame the United States itself for speeding ahead with a nuclear
“modernization” that, in the name of improving safety and reliability, risks
throwing fuel on the fire.]
By William J. Broad And David E. Sanger
The United States , Russia and China are now aggressively pursuing a new
generation of smaller, less destructive nuclear weapons. The buildups threaten
to revive a Cold War-era arms race and unsettle the balance of destructive
force among nations that has kept the nuclear peace for more than a half-century.
It
is, in large measure, an old dynamic playing out in new form as an economically
declining Russia , a rising China and an uncertain United States resume their one-upmanship.
American
officials largely blame the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, saying his
intransigence has stymied efforts to build on a 2010 arms control treaty and
further shrink the arsenals of the two largest nuclear powers. Some blame the
Chinese, who are looking for a technological edge to keep the United States at bay. And some blame the United States itself for speeding ahead with a nuclear
“modernization” that, in the name of improving safety and reliability, risks
throwing fuel on the fire.
President
Obama acknowledged that danger at the end of the Nuclear Security Summit
meeting in Washington early this month. He warned of the potential
for “ramping up new and more deadly and more effective systems that end up
leading to a whole new escalation of the arms race.”
For
a president who came to office more than seven years ago talking about
eventually ridding the world of nuclear weapons, it was an admission that an
American policy intended to reduce the centrality of atomic arms might
contribute to a second nuclear age.
One
of the few veterans of the Cold War in his administration, James R. Clapper, the
director of national intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee
during his annual global threat assessment, “We could be into another Cold War-like
spiral.” Yet it is different from Mr. Clapper’s earlier years, when he was an
Air Force intelligence officer weighing the risks of nuclear strikes that could
level cities with weapons measured by the megaton.
Adversaries
look at what the United States expects to spend on the nuclear revitalization
program — estimated at up to $1 trillion over three decades — and use it to
lobby for their own sophisticated weaponry.
The
Chinese military, under the tighter control of President Xi Jinping, is flight-testing
a novel warhead called a “hypersonic glide vehicle.” It flies into space on a
traditional long-range missile but then maneuvers through the atmosphere, twisting
and careening at more than a mile a second. That can render missile defenses
all but useless.
The
Obama administration is hardly in a position to complain. It is flight-testing
its own hypersonic weapon, but an experiment in 2014 ended in a spectacular
fireball. Flight tests are set to resume next year. As part of themodernization
process, it is also planning five classes of improved nuclear arms and
associated delivery vehicles that, as a family, are shifting the American
arsenal in the direction of small, stealthy and precise.
“We
are witnessing the opening salvos of an arms race,” James M. Acton, a senior
analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, last year told a
congressional commission that assesses China’s power.
One
fear about the new weapons is that they could undercut the grim logic of
“mutual assured destruction,” the Cold War doctrine that any attack would
result in massive retaliation and ultimately the annihilation of all combatants.
While much debated and often mocked — in classics like the movie “Dr. Strangelove”
— MAD , as it was known, worked. Now, the concern
is that the precision and less-destructive nature of these new weapons raises
the temptation to use them.
A
key question that Mr. Obama addressed is whether America ’s planned upgrades are helping drive this
competition. Or are Russia and China simply using the American push as an excuse
to perfect weapons they would build anyway?
Mr.
Obama, speaking at the summit meeting’s closing news conference, acknowledged
the tension stirred by the refurbishment of the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal.
He noted, for example, that communication links between the weapons and their
guardians needed better protections against cyberattack. But when asked if
warhead miniaturization and similar improvements could undermine his record of
progress on arms control, he replied: “It’s a legitimate question. And I am
concerned.”
White
House officials say they try to tamp down any worried reactions to the new
developments. In an interview, Avril Haines, the deputy national security
adviser, said, “When tensions develop, we take steps to avoid unnecessarily
raising the temperature.”
Mr.
Obama came to office in 2009 eager to “reset” relations with Moscow , reduce America ’s reliance on nuclear arms and move toward
their elimination. He was the first president to make nuclear disarmament a
centerpiece of American defense policy.
That
year, Mr. Obama offered another olive branch: He ordered the American military
to reduce the number of warheads atop its land-based missiles to one, from as
many as three. That was a signal to show the missiles were more about defense than
offense.
At
this month’s summit meeting, Mr. Obama blamed Mr. Putin’s return to the Russian
presidency in 2012 for preventing further arms reductions, saying the Kremlin
was “emphasizing military might over development.”
William
J. Perry, the defense secretary under President Bill Clinton and one of the
most influential nuclear experts in the Democratic Party, said he worried that
Moscow would soon withdraw from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996 and
begin perfecting new warheads in underground detonations. (The United States has abided by the treaty, but the Senate has
never ratified it.)
For
two decades, the main nuclear powers have observed a shaky global ban on
testing, a central pillar of nuclear arms control.
“I’m
confident they’re working on a new bomb,” Mr. Perry said in an interview, referring
to Russian arms designers. “And I’m confident they’re asking for testing.”
“It’s
up to Putin,” he added.
Advocates
of the American nuclear modernization program call it a reasonable response to
Mr. Putin’s aggression, especially his 2014 invasion of Crimea .
Military
experts argue that miniaturized weapons will help deter an expanding range of
potential attackers. “The United States needs discriminate nuclear options at all
rungs of the nuclear escalation ladder,”said a report last year from the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, a research group in Washington .
In
February, the White House backed development of an advanced cruise missile. Dropped
from a bomber, the flying weapon is to hug the ground for long distances and
zip through enemy air defenses to smash targets.
In
describing the atomic plans, the Pentagon explicitly calls the cruise missile
and related nuclear arms essential for “countering Russian aggression” in Eastern Europe .
The
administration is also developing a hypersonic warhead that would zoom ahead of
Beijing ’s rush to perfect its own. The American
version would be nonnuclear: The goal is a weapon so fast and precise that it
relies on the raw force of impact to destroy a fixed target, such as a missile
silo.
While
that fulfills the president’s commitment to rely less on atomic weapons, it may
prompt adversaries who cannot match the technology to depend more on nuclear
arms.
Mr.
Perry, the former defense secretary, argued that the diminished nuclear arms
and the nonnuclear weapons that Mr. Obama is developing could make the
unthinkable more likely.
“They
make the weapons seem more usable,” he said, “even if there’s no credible plan
for how you control escalation.”
No
major nuclear power is more threatened by the American advances than China , analysts say. A pre-emptive strike, they
note, might easily do in its relatively small arsenal.
For
a decade, Christopher P. Twomey, a national security expert at the Naval Postgraduate School , in Monterey , Calif. , has helped run informal meetings between American and Chinese
analysts, government officials and military officers.
Last
year in testimony to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, created
by Congress, he reported that Beijing felt increasingly encircled. It sees Washington ’s hypersonic glider as a way to attack China without crossing the nuclear threshold, complicating
its assessment of nuclear retaliation.
Dr.
Twomey said Chinese leaders had similar apprehensions about growing numbers of
antimissile interceptors on American warships in the Pacific as well as bases
in California and Alaska .
Finally,
he added, Beijing views Washington ’s nuclear modernization “with much
trepidation.” Specifically, he cited plans for a new guided bomb and the
advanced cruise missile, as well as new delivery systems.
“Beijing has responded to these changes,” Dr. Twomey
testified, “and will likely continue to do so over the next decade.”
It
turns out that Beijing is discussing an even more ominous step.
For
decades, Washington and Moscow have kept their nuclear forces on high alert
so that, in theory, military authorities can fire missiles if networks of
radars, satellites and computers detect an incoming strike. The tactic is meant
to dodge a crippling blow that might curb or eliminate a nation’s ability to
retaliate.
Critics
see the “launch on warning” tactic as greatly increasing the risk of accidental
war. In the past, they note, false alerts have repeatedly brought the world to
the brink of disaster.
Last
year, the Chinese military declared in an official document that the nation
seeks to “improve strategic early warning” for its nuclear forces.
Early
this year, the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge , Mass. , that backs arms control, published a report on the
intensifying launch-on-warning debate. It said the Obama administration’s arms
modernizations “are the most prominent external factor influencing Chinese advocates.”
Advocates
of arms control say their field needs reinvention. They see the counting of
warheads and delivery vehicles — the traditional levers — as unsuitable for
arresting the development of the new weapons.
Mark
Gubrud, a nuclear weapons expert at the University of North Carolina , has lobbied for the negotiation of a global
flight ban on the testing of hypersonic arms. If work continues, he wrote
recently, the maneuverable warheads are likely to become a global reality in
the next decade.
“The
world has failed to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle,” Dr. Gubrud said.
“And new genies are now getting loose.”
Mark
Lander contributed reporting from Washington .