AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Critical question is increasingly coming under scrutiny - is the world on the brink of a new nuclear arms race? The Pentagon warned this month that the period of nuclear deescalation that's followed the Cold War is over. James Acton has been following what this might mean. He's the co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Welcome to the program.
JAMES ACTON: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
RASCOE: So why are we now having this talk of a new arms race at this moment?
ACTON: Sure. So I think it may be helpful to start historically and think about how we got here. We had an arms race during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Each side built tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at the height of the arms race. But eventually, the Soviet Union and the United States decided to settle for rough parity, especially in the kind of long-range weapons that could reach one another's states.
And so the second half of the Cold War is then marked by this period of nuclear arsenals getting smaller, of arms control. And that was the world that we were in for about 20 years after the end of the Cold War. But it's really starting to change today and primarily in that because the growth of China's nuclear arsenal.
RASCOE: Is it just the growth of China's nuclear arsenal, or is it others that are also, like, leading to this?
ACTON: It's primarily about China and to a lesser extent about Russia. You know, there's three big changes with China and Russia. The U.S. today has a few thousand nuclear weapons. China's got a few hundred, but that number is rising pretty rapidly, and the Pentagon expects it to keep rising.
The second one is the era of arms control is, unfortunately, from my opinion, almost certainly over. The last arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia, New START, is going to expire in February 2026. I think there's very little chance of a successor. And that means, without a cap on Russia's nuclear arsenal, it could get bigger in the future.
And then the third and final change is fears about the possibility of Russia and China, in some way or another, ganging up on the U.S. That could be - maybe the U.S. gets into a war against Russia, and then China decides opportunistically to take Taiwan. Maybe Russia and China engage in some kind of coordinated act of aggression against the U.S.
RASCOE: Is deterrence still a value, you think? Or do you think we need to think about deterrence in a new way?
ACTON: Well, I think deterrence is something that we're going to have to live with for a very long time. And when we say deterrence, we shouldn't just think about nuclear deterrence. Part of the value of having strong conventional forces is that you hope to deter adversaries from committing acts of aggression.
So the question to my mind is, how do you get as much value as you can while reducing the risks of nuclear deterrence? You know, in some sense, nuclear deterrence works precisely because there is some risk of nuclear weapons being used, of the situation getting out of hand, of leading to some kind of catastrophe. And I think that that really does concentrate leaders' minds during a crisis and does make them behave less aggressively.
On the other hand, if this strategy fails, and nuclear weapons are used, the president would have the option of attacking an adversary's nuclear forces preemptively to try to destroy them. And that, I think, to most Americans sounds like quite a sensible thing to do. It sounds very much like traditional military strategy.
The problem is that if we start targeting China or Russia's nuclear forces, they're going to build more nuclear forces as a result. That's going to lead to arms racing. That's going to exacerbate international tensions and make a war more likely. So to my mind, what we should really focus on as the United States here to reduce nuclear risks is having a nuclear arsenal that is safe, secure, reliable and survivable.
RASCOE: You study these issues day in and day out. What keeps you up late at night?
ACTON: I mean, I'm tempted to say screaming kids is what keeps me up late at night. But. ..
RASCOE: Yeah. (Laughter) Yeah.
ACTON: ...In terms of nuclear weapons - you know, there were times in the Ukraine war - the very beginning of the war and then later in the fall - when Ukraine was doing very well on the battlefield, and Russia was starting to do some stuff that I viewed as being pretty scary. There were times when I was not keeping-me-up-at-night-type worried, but I was worried about the possibility - not the likelihood, but the possibility - that Russia might use nuclear weapons.
But the thing about the Ukraine war is the U.S. is not a direct participant in that war. I mean, we provide weapons and materiel to Ukraine, but we don't have U.S. servicemen and women on the battlefield. In a direct U.S.-Russia or U.S.-China conflict in which the United States was directly involved, I think the possibility of nuclear use would be significantly higher compared to the Ukraine war. So in some sense, it's very much like a Cold War fear. I mean, in the Cold War, we worried about the possibility of a NATO-Soviet conflict as being the most likely pathway to nuclear war. And today, it's the same kind of great power conflict between the U.S. and Russia or the U.S. and China.
RASCOE: That's James Acton from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thank you so much for joining us.
ACTON: It was a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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