By Henry Sokolski
In five months, America will elect its next president. Not surprisingly, both leading candidates, through their lieutenants, are already floating what they would do to counter the rising military threats China, Russia, and their proxies now pose. They are both spotlighting the possibility of expanding America’s nuclear arsenal — the primary strategic lever Washington used to win the Cold War 35 years ago.
Whatever the merits of a quick nuclear ramp-up might be, neither camp has yet adequately described what the full requirements of a long-term strategic contest with Russia, China, and their proxies will entail. That’s unfortunate, as it will surely require far more than what any adjustment of our nuclear arsenal numbers could afford.
How much more is laid out a new Nonproliferation Policy Education Center monograph, China, Russia, and the Coming Cool War.
It consists of four chapters.
The first sketches out what a long-term contest with China, Russia, and its proxies will demand. Although building up military might and using threats of massive destruction against our enemies were critical to winning the Cold War, in the coming cool contest, they will no longer serve as our top ace in the hole. Instead, the key levers will be keeping our key military, political, and commercial functions immune to attacks and communicating, protecting, sharing, and analyzing essential information on an unprecedented scale. Wars may be waged against nations but the aim increasingly will be to disable them without physically obliterating them.
What, though, should we do about the growing nuclear threat? That’s the focus of the volume’s next chapter, “Xi and Putin Are Building More Nukes: How to Compete.” It, in turn, is followed by “What Missile-driven Competition with China Will Look Like,” which was first released three years ago. The Pentagon recently confirmed this essay’s predictions about China’s development of intercontinental conventional missiles by 2030. The essay’s other forecasts and military and diplomatic proposals are still timely.
“What’s needed most is a geographic distribution of America’s critical military and financial infrastructure and demographic capital.”
This brings us to the volume’s last chapter, “Can Self-Government Survive the Next Convulsion?” It examines the domestic political, economic, and social implications of pursuing this volume’s recommendations. What’s needed most is a geographic distribution of America’s critical military and financial infrastructure and demographic capital. Fortunately, this has already begun, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, and aligns with America’s bent to spread and increase political power and wealth domestically.
The volume’s final section is an appendix consisting of an introduction Thomas Cochran and I co-authored for “China’s Civil Nuclear Sector: Plowshares to Swords?” — a three-year NPEC study of China’s nuclear weapons production potential. The Pentagon has cited this research in each of its annual Chinese military power assessments for the last three years running. The Pentagon has used the study to help explain why China is likely to acquire as many nuclear weapons in a decade as the United States currently has deployed. It was this projection, perhaps more than any other, that caused national security analysts to focus on what is likely to be a long-term strategic contest with China and its new ally, Russia, as well as its most recent alliance with a nuclear-armed North Korea.
Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, served as deputy for nonproliferation in the Defense Department and is the author of Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future.
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