The Cold War intermission is over

Since the Cold War’s peaceful end more than 30 years ago, Americans have generally thought little, let alone worried much, about nuclear weapons. At its peak in the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union possessed around 45,000 nuclear warheads, with most of them targeted at the United States. The United States in turn wielded around 24,000 nuclear warheads, primarily deployed to deter a Soviet attack.

This nuclear standoff was called the “balance of terror.” For four decades, the American and Soviet people alike lived with the daily dread that each day could be their last since a nuclear war would almost certainly destroy the entire planet in a literal apocalypse. Readers of a certain vintage will recall the hallmarks of nuclear fears, such as “duck and cover” drills, fallout shelters, and the 1983 broadcast of the most-watched television movie in U.S. history, The Day After.

America’s Cold War victory and the Soviet Union’s collapse largely ended these nuclear nightmares. The three decades since have seen both Russia and the United States dramatically reduce their arsenals, such that each nation now maintains only one-tenth as many warheads as during the 1980s.

Now a new era of nuclear threats is upon us. Last week, the well-sourced New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger reported that in March, the Biden administration issued new strategic guidance on nuclear weapons. This highly classified document apparently directs the modernization and expansion of America’s aging nuclear arsenal and identifies China as a growing nuclear threat.

President Joe Biden’s quiet turnabout is profound. For most of his half-century political career, including his eight years as vice president and the first three years of his presidency, he sought to reduce the American nuclear arsenal in both size and strategic importance. Now, in his final White House year, he has reversed course to support the growth and upgrade of America’s nuclear weapons.

Why the volte-face? Because the world has become much more dangerous. For the first time in history, there are at least three hostile states with nuclear arsenals capable of hitting the United States: Russia, China, and North Korea. As senior Pentagon official and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Vipin Narang observed, “It is our responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we hoped or wished it would be. It is possible that we will one day look back and see the quarter-century after the Cold War as nuclear intermission.” That intermission is over.

China’s nuclear expansion is especially ambitious, with Beijing on track to match the size of America’s nuclear arsenal within a decade. Our adversaries are also creating new delivery systems beyond the traditional “triad” of missiles, submarines, and bombers. The Economist reports that Russia is preparing to put nuclear weapons into space to target satellites that are critical to the American economy and the U.S. military.

Even more worrisome, these three tyrannies have formed a de facto alliance with each other and Iran, which is on the nuclear threshold. This brings the new risk of coordinated nuclear threats (or worse) against the United States and our allies. Imagine if each of those dictatorships simultaneously employed “nuclear blackmail” by demanding that its regional rival surrender under threat of imminent nuclear attack: Russia toward Ukraine, North Korea toward South Korea, China toward Taiwan, and Iran toward Israel. The only way to prevent that nightmare scenario is for the United States to deploy a credible nuclear deterrent.

There is a sense of the tragic in nuclear weapons with their unfathomable destructive capacity. It is the curse of our fallen world that we need such awful instruments to thwart the aggressive designs of evildoers. But thwart them we must. Indeed, for Christians, credible nuclear deterrence derives from the Biblical command to love our neighbors. As two co-authors and I have written in an article on how Christians should think about nuclear weapons, we must ground “nuclear doctrine in the just war tradition with its principles of protecting civilian populations and proportionate use of force, and focus on preserving peace and promoting justice as the ends of statecraft.”

The nuclear paradox is that we need to wield such weapons to prevent their use by evildoers. This is what President Ronald Reagan meant when he called for “peace through strength.” It is also a modern incarnation of the admonition in Romans 13 that the ruler “does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” In this troubled and perilous moment, the United States needs to sharpen its nuclear sword, and we must pray that it never needs to be unsheathed.