The Pentagon is conducting a review of nuclear weapons use that seeks to provide the president and military leaders with greater options for using tactical nuclear weapons in a regional conflict while preventing an escalation into global thermonuclear war, according to a senior defense policymaker.
Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, said he is working closely with Adm. Richard Correll, Strategic Command chief, in conducting “a review or sort of relook at the employment guidance” for nuclear weapons.
Details of the nuclear review remain secret, but the outlines were disclosed by Mr. Colby earlier this month during a speech and remarks to a Strategic Command conference in Omaha, Neb.
“We have to be able to provide strategic deterrence and a capable and credible extended deterrent that’s coupled with our conventional forces as part of an integrated, broader, sensible strategy,” Mr. Colby stated in the speech.
The review is seeking to prevent China and Russia from miscalculating that the U.S. would be reluctant to respond to the use of battlefield nuclear attacks during a Taiwan invasion by China or Russian tactical nuclear strikes on Ukraine.
One goal of the review is said by U.S. officials to seek ways to enhance nuclear deterrence of both nations that hold much larger stockpiles of low-yield nuclear weapons than the U.S.
Matching nuclear power with stronger conventional U.S. military forces and improving military readiness of American allies and partners also is part of the nuclear review, Mr. Colby said.
“Everything we’re doing at the nuclear level as well is designed to make sure that we expand the president’s options” for “flexible response” — the combined conventional, tactical nuclear, and strategic nuclear power that will reduce reliance on an automatic all-out nuclear response strike, he said.
U.S. nuclear deterrence currently is strained as a result of outdated strategic systems and growing advances in the nuclear arsenals and forces of China and Russia.
The review underway is not a major strategic posture review that was last carried out in 2022, Mr. Colby said. U.S. declaratory nuclear use policy remains unchanged.
American policy on using nuclear weapons is that the arms are for deterring nuclear attacks on the U.S. and its allies, and would be used only in extreme circumstances.
U.S. nuclear forces are undergoing historic modernization that includes replacement weapons for all three legs of the “triad” – land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, strategic bombers and submarine-launched nuclear missiles.
Mr. Colby said the review is focused on updating the Strategic Command commander’s responsibilities, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s authorities and guidance, and President Trump’s guidance to the Pentagon.
Current low-yield warheads include the W76-2, an 8-kiloton warhead deployed on Trident II submarine-launched missiles, and the B61-12, an adjustable, low-yield gravity bomb that can be dropped by B-2 bombers and specially outfitted F-35s.
Missile delivery systems for low-yield warheads include the new air-launched Long-Range Standoff Weapon cruise missile that is now moving into production, and the nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile known as SLCM-N, slated for deployment in 2034.
The Pentagon wants to expand nuclear use options beyond strategic counterforce, or large-scale strikes, and options that support a “denial defense” while favoring greater management of conflict escalation, he said.
“Again, I don’t say this with any blasé, that would be a titanic historic catastrophe to have crossed the nuclear threshold,” Mr. Colby said. “Nobody is looking at that with anything but the gravest mind, but if it did happen, in order to have… it be credible and rational and effective on a potential opponent, he’s got to believe there’s some sense in which we would use it,” he said.
The undersecretary said he is most concerned about a limited regional conflict going nuclear.
“What I would fear more is a regional war,” he said, “a kind of local war, conventional war that might have local employment, God forbid, of nuclear weapons that could escalate from there as it, as it expanded outward.”
“Again, it’s not taking away options for the president,” Mr. Colby said. “It’s adding credible options.”
“Given all that, how do we effectively prepare to fight a war, again, to avoid it to uphold our alliance commitments in a rational way that will not, at that vital moment, either result in a catastrophe whose costs are way out of proportion to whatever we’re fighting about, or more plausibly cause the political leadership to say ’No, I don’t want do that,’ and then you have strategic catastrophe because people say, I was calibrated to something else,” he said.
Nuclear strategy and employment options are being studied and the use policy needs to maintain fundamental strategic assured destruction, but also to have “something that will connect down,” he said.
Mr. Colby said that for many years in the private sector he has been analyzing the importance of preparing for “limited war” that has been dismissed by some defense experts as unlikely because of concerns “things will spiral out of control and be the end of the world.”
Mr. Colby said his lesson from the Ukraine war is the importance of strategic deterrence and second-strike large-scale weapons for assured destruction, but “we also need to have things, whether it’s theater capabilities or strategic capabilities.”
“What we’re focused on is less about the range of the weapons and more about rationally employable, limited options that advantage us and stand the chance of favorably managing escalation and not getting us into an inexorable spiral,” he said.
On China, Mr. Colby said Beijing turned to nuclear weapons “because they felt that we had sort of pretty aggressively employed nuclear blackmail as they put it against them, to some extent, Korea and during the Taiwan Straits crises in the 1950s.”
China’s nuclear buildup, including deployment of more than 300 new ICBM silos in the western part of the country, has been described by U.S. military leaders as “breathtaking” and unprecedented since the Cold War.
Mr. Colby rejected Chinese claims that the U.S. should be driven out of Asia, noting strong American interests in the region.
“So we’re going to be there, but we’re going to have a strategy and force posture that is rationally tied to that interest,” he said.
The Pentagon is developing what he termed a “denial strategy” that seeks to maintain a balance of power and prevent the emergence of a “hegemonic” power, an indirect reference to China, Mr. Colby said.
China’s military buildup is historic, he said, and Chinese plans to assault Taiwan are “a very, very challenging military problem” that “would affect us directly.”
U.S. military power, especially submarines, remains a powerful deterrent against such an attack.
“I mean, you look at our submarine force, it is the best in the world, and I don’t say that lightly. It is absolutely devastating, and that’s a product of technology,” he said.
“And if you go into the maritime domain, you are going to deal with our submarine force, and that is going to be very, very, very dangerous. Same with our Air Force. You know, if you’re dealing with obviously our ICBM force, but also our bomber pilot capabilities, our fifth-generation capabilities,” he said.
Deterring a Chinese military attack on Taiwan will be more like winning the Battle of Britain in World War II than marching to Berlin in 1945, he said.
“All we have to do is prevent anybody from crossing a body of water and sustaining operations in the face of determined resistance. That is a very practical objective,” he said.
The Pentagon also conducts extended deterrence for nations like Japan and South Korea and in support of NATO states in Europe, and Mr. Colby said the U.S. remains opposed to “friendly proliferation” – U.S. allies and partners seeking their own nuclear weapons.
Japan’s Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said last month that Japan “cannot avoid” debating whether to build nuclear weapons based on a deteriorating security environment marked by nuclear threats from China and North Korea.
The Trump administration also is trying to resume arms negotiations with China and Russia. Arms talks broke down with Moscow over the Ukraine invasion and China is continuing to balk at U.S. appeals to join nuclear arms discussions.
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