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      Arms control experts argue that the need to address the threats from Chinese and Russian tactical nuclear weapons should not blind Trump to the benefits that an extended New START would bring to U.S. national security.

      Rose Gottemoeller, the chief U.S. negotiator for New START, told lawmakers in December that since the treaty entered into force in 2011, it has established strategic weapons parity between the United States and Russia, providing Americans with a stable and predictable security environment. Extending the treaty for another five years, she argued, would preserve that predictability while the Pentagon modernizes its nuclear forces. It would also give the United States time to negotiate a new treaty that includes China, she said.

      “Without the treaty, things could change drastically and quickly,” Gottemoeller told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in December, 2019. “There is no faster way for the Russians to outrun us than to deploy more nuclear warheads on their missiles.”¹⁶

      Is a limited nuclear war a viable option?

      In a striking illustration of the return to Cold War thinking, Russian and U.S. military planners now believe it is possible to wage limited nuclear war without it escalating into a nuclear apocalypse.

      In such a war, each side would use low-yield, or tactical, weapons on the battlefield. Depending on its size and radiation yield, a single tactical nuclear weapon could kill thousands of troops and contaminate its blast radius for decades.

      Since the start of the Cold War in the 1940s, U.S. and Soviet military leaders envisioned using smaller nuclear weapons to halt a major armored thrust by the other side in Europe, or to block the enemy’s advance through a strategic mountain pass. Nowadays, they are regarded as effective weapons against military or nuclear installations buried deep underground, or to save one’s forces from a conventional defeat while discouraging the enemy from waging further hostilities.

      Moreover, say U.S. military experts, Russia has adopted an “escalate-to-de-escalate” strategy, believing that using such tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield would quickly de-escalate a military confrontation with U.S. and NATO forces, because Washington would balk at a full-scale nuclear response that would lead to global annihilation.

      In response, the United States has begun producing more tactical nuclear warheads for its cruise missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles so it can deter the threat of any tactical nuclear strike and retaliate proportionally should one be used against U.S. or allied forces. The Pentagon refers to such deterrence as “escalation dominance.”

      The National Nuclear Security Administration, the federal agency responsible for the effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, said new tactical warheads have been rolling off a production line in Texas since this past January. And in February, the Pentagon announced it has equipped the Navy’s Trident ballistic missiles with a new tactical warhead, the W76-2, which has less than a third of the destructive power of other U.S. nuclear weapons.¹⁷

      The Pentagon’s 100-page “2018 Nuclear Posture Review” outlined the buildup of tactical nuclear weapons as a key element of the Trump administration’s nuclear policy: “Expanding flexible U.S. nuclear options now, to include low-yield options, is important for the preservation of credible deterrence against regional aggression. It will … help ensure that potential adversaries perceive no possible advantage in limited nuclear escalation, making nuclear employment less likely.”¹⁸

      But the Trump nuclear doctrine is controversial. The Ploughshares Fund’s Cirincione warns that it would blur the line between the use of conventional and nuclear weapons and expand the circumstances in which the U.S. military would go nuclear. For example, the administration’s nuclear review says the United States could use nuclear weapons in response to “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks,” such as a crippling cyberstrike on the nation’s power grid or other essential infrastructure.¹⁹

      Another Pentagon document, titled simply “Nuclear Operations,” outlined a broad range of additional scenarios in which the U.S. military might use nuclear weapons.

      The document said integrating nuclear weapons with conventional and special operations “is essential to the success of any mission or operation.” Furthermore, it said, “The spectrum of nuclear warfare may range from tactical application, to limited regional use, to global employment by friendly forces and/or enemies. … Employment of nuclear weapons can radically alter or accelerate the course of a campaign. A nuclear weapon could be brought into the campaign as a result of perceived failure in a conventional campaign, potential loss of control or regime, or to escalate the conflict to sue for peace on more favorable terms.”²⁰

      Further expanding the potential use of nuclear weapons in conventional combat, the Pentagon document said field commanders “can nominate potential targets to consider for nuclear options that would support [the commander’s] objectives in ongoing operations.”²¹

      Arms control advocates, including former senior Defense officials, said the U.S. and Russian embrace of a limited nuclear war doctrine represents a highly dangerous throwback to the Cold War years.

      “Anybody that thinks you can use a tactical weapon and not have a profound risk of escalation all the way to an all-out nuclear war is risking the world on a pretty naive assumption,” says Sam Nunn, a former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and co-founder of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a research organization that educates policymakers on the dangers of nuclear weapons. “It’s very high risk,” he says.

      But Elbridge Colby, a former senior Defense Department official, cautioned that with the return of great-power competition, Russia and China have developed strategies to defeat the United States in a military confrontation and that tactical nuclear weapons are a key part of their strategies.²² He supports the U.S. production of tactical nuclear weapons, which could help defeat a Russian or Chinese attack “without provoking a nuclear apocalypse,” he said, adding that demonstrating such a capability to U.S. adversaries “is the best way to avoid ever having to put it into practice.”²³

      Another proponent of the limited nuclear war doctrine, Keir Lieber, a nuclear arms expert at Georgetown University, says if deterrence fails and the use of a nuclear weapon is required, a tactical weapon diminishes the chances of a full-scale nuclear exchange in certain cases. He paints a possible scenario in which Russia overruns the former Soviet republic of Estonia and explodes a low-yield nuclear weapon to get NATO forces to sue for peace. That would prompt the Western alliance to retaliate with its own tactical nuclear weapon, he says.

      “Is it going to stop there?” he asks. “I don’t know why one would assume that it will continue to escalate from there.”

      In response to the emerging doctrine of limited nuclear war, researchers at The Lab—part of Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, which studies nuclear arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament—recently used extensive data on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces, war plans and targets to produce a four-minute video showing how the limited use of nuclear weapons could quickly escalate into a full-scale nuclear war, killing or wounding more than 90 million people in a few hours.²⁴

      Underscoring the difficulty of limiting a nuclear exchange to tactical weapons, Nunn and other skeptics note that U.S. and Russian leaders would not know whether an incoming missile is carrying a tactical nuclear warhead or a city-destroying strategic weapon, raising the chances of a full-blown nuclear exchange.

      “Hey all you nuclear powers out there. We’re just going to trust that you recognize this is just a little nuclear weapon and won’t retaliate with all you’ve got,” tweeted Melissa Hanham, an expert on nuclear weapons at One Earth Future, a Washington-based foundation that advocates arms control. “Remember! The U.S. only intends to nuke you ‘a little bit.’ ”²⁵

      Is a denuclearization agreement with North Korea possible?

      In June 2017, Trump upended decades of American policy

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