Managing Russia’s nuclear threats, China’s opaque nuclear buildup, and North Korea’s increasing provocations—and the increasingly close relationships among them—will be no easy feat. At the same time, Washington will need to navigate its extended deterrence commitments and efforts to better integrate with U.S. allies and finally organize for a series of consequential, long-term decisions on the future of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. While a high-intensity war with China or Russia or a major conflict with North Korea is not inevitable, the pathways to potential conflicts are increasing, and so too are the risks of nuclear use—especially limited nuclear use. With an exceedingly complex international security environment, policymakers, planners, and legislatures need to think about the unthinkable this year and take action. Detering nuclear use requires a sober assessment of the new and changing ways adversaries are attempting to leverage nuclear weapons and clear-eyed plans for how to manage nuclear threats if deterrence fails.
Here are the top five nuclear issues to address in 2024:
Russia’s Nuclear Threats and the War in Ukraine
As the war in Ukraine enters its third year and the administration and Congress debate future U.S. security assistance to Ukraine, a key question will be how Russia’s nuclear signaling and threats will evolve in 2024 and how the trajectory of the conflict will affect the potential for nuclear use. While the risk of use likely remains low amid the current stalemate, significant changes on the ground, such as a significant spike in attacks deep inside Russia, could affect that calculus. In addition, with increased cooperation between Russia and North Korea (and Iran) and confirmation that North Korea is providing Russia with ballistic missiles and ballistic missile launchers, another key question will be to what extent this kind of assistance affects the situation on the ground, whether this prolongs the conflict, and how this affects overall escalation dynamics. With the intelligence community assessing that “Moscow will become even more reliant on nuclear, cyber, and space capabilities as it deals with the extensive damage to Russia’s ground forces,” nuclear risks could actually grow in the coming months and years, making it essential that Washington, NATO, and Kyiv remain prepared and clear-eyed about how to handle a range of scenarios, especially those involving “battlefield” nuclear weapons and limited nuclear use.
In addition, while U.S. officials have indicated that they have not yet seen changes to Russia’s strategic nuclear forces since it suspended New START, without onsite inspections or data exchanges, it may become more difficult over time to maintain confidence that there have been no militarily significant operational changes to Russia’s strategic forces using national technical means alone. This means there will be very few guardrails on the broader U.S.-Russia strategic relationship, making it—as well as Russia’s efforts to deliberately manipulate nuclear risks in Ukraine and beyond—one of the top nuclear issues to watch in 2024.
China’s Nuclear Buildup
China’s rapid expansion and diversification of its nuclear forces also demands attention in 2024. While the administration has made clear that “the United States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them,” a number of recent high-profile commissions, reports, and studies argue for important changes to U.S. nuclear forces, setting up a renewed debate over what’s driving China’s nuclear buildup and whether and how the United States should respond. China’s nuclear buildup cannot be viewed in isolation, however. This is fundamentally a question of whether the United States has the necessary force structure to manage concurrent or sequential conflicts with two nuclear-armed adversaries—a force-sizing construct the Pentagon abandoned years ago (and never truly had to address in the same way).
At the same time, the debate over potential changes to the size and composition of U.S. nuclear forces cannot mask questions over how Washington and its allies would respond to Chinese nuclear coercion or even limited nuclear use in certain scenarios, particularly a Taiwan crisis. Such a crisis could occur well before any changes to the current program of record materialize, and China is no doubt watching how Russia is deliberately manipulating nuclear risks in the war in Ukraine. With continued cross-Strait tensions and an uncertain future for the broader U.S.-China relationship, it is essential that officials understand the conditions under which China might use nuclear weapons and be prepared to manage the nuclear shadow that will loom over virtually any conventional conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Arms control talks with China may help improve this understanding over time, but recent efforts to engage on these issues are unlikely to translate into a reliable risk reduction mechanism any time soon or change the operational dilemmas U.S. forces might encounter. This means that Washington and its allies need to deepen planning and consultations in 2024 on managing the nuclear shadow with China for if and when a conflict occurs and ensure that these efforts are fully integrated into broader defense planning efforts.
Tensions with North Korea and Opportunistic Aggression
In his New Year address, Kim Jong-unn warned that North Korea needs to prepare for war with the United States in 2024 and pointed to the U.S.-Republic of Korea (ROK) Washington Declaration, increased trilateral exercises, and the more visible presence of U.S. strategic assets as the reason behind the North’s aggressive posturing. While to some extent, this kind of rhetoric and blame game is more of the same—especially in an election year—North Korea’s continued quantitative and qualitative growth of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, including both long-range systems capable of striking the United States and its increasing emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons, pose serious threats to the United States, ROK, and Japan that cannot be ignored or wished away. Washington and Seoul cannot deter missile tests or satellite launches, but they can take steps to ensure U.S. and ROK forces are prepared for both major conflicts as well as localized attacks, which can in turn help deter a war that no one wants. This requires consistently updating plans and assumptions, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and maintaining readiness for a wide range of North Korea contingencies. Maintaining this focus can be difficult given all of the demands on U.S. forces and the attention on great power competition, but it is essential.
