Biden’s Secret Nuclear Weapons Strategy: Everything We Know About New Plan

President Joe Biden has approved revisions to a classified nuclear strategic document that redirects Washington’s deterrent strategy to focus on China’s nuclear arsenal expansion for the first time, according to a report.
Updates to the strategic document, titled “Nuclear Employment Guidance,” were approved by Biden in March. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the document is updated roughly every four years and is highly classified. No electronic copies of it exist, only a few hard copies that are distributed to national security and Pentagon officials, the Times said.
The Times cited recent public comments by two senior Biden administration officials that alluded to a change to Washington’s nuclear deterrence guidance. In June, the National Security Council’s senior director for arms control disarmament and nonproliferation, Pranay Vaddi, emphasized while speaking before the annual Arms Control Association meeting that the U.S. needed a strategy “to deter Russia, the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and North Korea simultaneously.”
Earlier this month, Vipin Narang, a former acting assistant secretary of defense for space policy, said in a speech that Biden had “recently issued updated nuclear weapons employment guidance to account for multiple nuclear-armed adversaries, and, in particular, the significant increase in the size and diversity of the PRC’s nuclear arsenal.”
The White House has not announced changes to its nuclear deterrence strategy. But the Times’ report comes as tensions over potential nuclear threats from U.S. adversaries, such as China and Russia, continue to rise.
The Pentagon said in October 2023 that Beijing has more than 500 operational nuclear warheads in its arsenal and estimates that the number will exceed 1,000 warheads by 2030. And Russia’s growing military ties with China and North Korea during its war with Ukraine have raised security concerns for the U.S.’s allies in the Indo-Pacific.
Newsweek has reached out to the White House via email for additional comment.
In his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has repeatedly warned that the U.S. is heading toward a major nuclear conflict. In an interview with Elon Musk livestreamed on X (formerly Twitter), the former president suggested that China could “catch up, maybe even surpass” Washington in terms of nuclear weapons.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian addressed this claim at a press conference a few days later, saying, that the “nuclear arsenal of the U.S. is way bigger than China’s.”
Lin also said that Beijing follows a “no-first-use” policy, referring to a nuclear power’s commitment to not use nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction when striking first in warfare.
The Pentagon’s report last fall said the U.S. has about 3,700 nuclear warheads in its stockpile and roughly 1,419 strategic nuclear weapons deployed.