Most Americans assume the United States is the world’s unrivaled nuclear superpower. The truth is, America’s nuclear stockpile has shrunk significantly. Meanwhile, China is building nuclear weapons at a rapid pace, and arms experts believe the world’s security is now at serious risk due to the communist regime’s expansionist schemes.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has dramatically reduced the number of nuclear weapons it has deployed or in storage. That arsenal today is roughly 85 percent smaller than at the height of the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and the number of operational nukes is tiny compared to 40 years ago.
America’s nuclear stockpile has fallen to levels not seen since the 1960s, while China has embarked on an unprecedented nuclear buildup.
The U.S. may have as few as 1,700 operational nuclear weapons, and the newest is over 35 years old.
Since the 1960s, across Asia, the U.S. has withdrawn its nuclear weapons from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, leaving only a base on Guam with nuclear forces.
If war were to break out over Taiwan, experts fear our base on Guam could be neutralized in a Chinese first strike, leaving America with no land-based battlefield nuclear option in the Pacific.
“All of this requires urgent action,” says Frank Gaffney, the host of Securing America. Gaffney served as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, when a strategy of ‘peace through strength’ and a nuclear arms buildup helped defeat the Soviet Union.
“All of that has essentially gone over the side. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is, having experienced all of that, to see what we are hoping that nobody notices that we haven’t done a whole lot with our nuclear deterrent since I left the Pentagon,” Gaffney said.
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The US has also retired the nuclear variant of the Tomahawk cruise missile, removing an important tactical option.
It seems as if the U.S. assumed the threat of nuclear war would be a thing of the past. China, meanwhile, has taken a different course, tripling the size of its nuclear arsenal in just 5 years. It is now the planet’s fastest-growing nuclear power.
“I think that they are increasing the size of their nuclear arsenal, because they want to use it to coerce others into standing down,” says China expert Gordon Chang.
Chang believes Beijing learned a lesson from the way Russia’s Vladimir Putin used the threat of nuclear war to deter the West from more direct involvement in the Ukraine war.
“So the Chinese saw that this actually works. I think that they will precede any invasion of Taiwan, Japan, whatever, with threats to use their nuclear weapons to get the U.S. not to come to the aid of its friends and partners,” Chang explained.
The U.S. military does have new nuclear weapons systems under development. The Sentinel is supposed to replace the aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile. And the Pentagon has finally announced a new gravity nuclear bomb, the kind dropped from aircraft, to replace the B-61, which has been in service since the 1960s.
But having dealt with the Soviets, Gaffney thinks China has even more nuclear weapons than the world thinks it has, some stored in its western desert.
“They never bought this idea that Ronald Reagan, my mild and much-revered boss, famously said, which is ‘a nuclear war, can never be won and must never be fought.’ They don’t buy that. They believe nuclear war is a thing – a nuclear war is something that can be used decisively,” Gaffney explained.
Then there are the growing nuclear threats from Russia, North Korea, and Iran. But to counter the fastest-growing nuclear power, China, some defense experts believe the U.S. would need to return at least some nuclear weapons to bases in Asia, something that would probably face stiff political opposition within the U.S.
