The U.S. government last week released the Nuclear Posture Review, a congressionally mandated report that explains its thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear policy. The NPR reflects the Trump administration's belief that the world is increasingly shaped by great power competition and that nuclear arms are needed to promote security and stability. The world is more dangerous than it has been for a long time, but there are justifiable concerns that this new approach could magnify dangers, not reduce them.
Every NPR has three goals: to deter adversaries, to reassure allies and to create conditions that promote disarmament. Arguing that the world has changed significantly since the last NPR was written in 2010, the latest report is oriented more toward deterrence, while retaining a commitment to nonproliferation and arms control. The authors of the NPR devote considerable space to the reassurance of allies, and it focuses on strengthening extended deterrence. It supports ongoing, close collaboration with allies and partners to ensure that strategies are tailored to their specific situation.
The new document acknowledges the long-standing U.S. goal to reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons — its stockpile of nuclear weapons has been cut by more than 85 percent since the Cold War peak — but seems to reverse the effort of previous administrations to reduce the salience of nuclear weapons in U.S. defense policy. That change is based on the belief that other countries have been modernizing arsenals and doctrines, and as a result have acquired weapons systems that can be deployed in crises. The United States must prevent them from believing that nuclear weapons will allow them to prevail in those situations. To that end, the NPR calls for the creation of two new capabilities: a low-yield warhead for submarine-launched ballistic missiles and a nuclear-capable submarine-launched cruise missile. Low-yield nuclear weapons have long been part of the U.S. arsenal; nuclear-tipped cruise missiles were once deployed by the U.S. but they were shelved years ago, a move that troubled some Japanese strategists.