Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons pose a far greater threat to the safety and security of Americans than is reflected in our public discourse. While the United States must maintain a strong nuclear deterrent as an important tool of U.S. foreign and defense policy, an oversized global arsenal of nuclear weapons makes Americans equally unsafe. It is time to reinvigorate arms control discussions to seek reasonable reductions that will make us all more secure.

Too many nuclear weapons increase the risk of theft by terrorists or other nefarious actors, encourage more countries to develop nuclear arms, and raise the risk of nuclear war. Reasonable arms control measures, taken in conjunction with adversaries like Russia, make Americans safer by diminishing the large Russian nuclear arsenal, reinforcing norms against the development and use of nuclear arms, securing or eliminating nuclear material from theft or misuse by terrorists, and saving money that can be used to strengthen the United States military’s conventional deterrence against costly and destructive wars. 

In order to achieve those goals, Washington and Moscow have cut their strategic nuclear weapons since the height of the Cold War. Through the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which the U.S. and Russia recently extended, both countries each reduced their nuclear arsenals to no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads arming no more than 700 deployed strategic ballistic missiles and bombers.

Yet, despite these historic cuts, the United States and Russia each still have far more nuclear weapons than either side could conceivably use in a conflict, and at least ten times more weapons than any other country in the world. This actually makes Americans less safe, rather than the other way around.

In 2013, the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that the United States could safely reduce the number of deployed strategic warheads by one-third. The Biden administration should use that study—along with the current Nuclear Posture Review– to set the United States on the path to reasonable reductions. 

The Biden administration should aim for new negotiations between the United States and Russian to limit each country’s armed forces to 1,000 deployed strategic warheads. The agreement can be executed incrementally, and the sides might informally agree once negotiations began to deploy no more than 1,400 strategic warheads, as an early confidence-building measure. This first step is an easy and safe one to take, as there have been times over the past decade when both countries already deployed fewer than 1,400 strategic warheads.

As part of a bold new vision for arms control and strategic stability, U.S. negotiators should seek an agreement that encompasses all U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads, including reserve (non-deployed) strategic warheads, and non-strategic nuclear weapons. Negotiators should work to limit all nuclear warheads to no more than 2,500 each, with an embedded sub-limit of 1,000 deployed strategic warheads within the overall aggregate limit. Even with the dramatic arsenal reductions outlined here, the United States would maintain the ability to deter and, if necessary, defend against any global adversary.

Such a nuclear arms reduction agreement would have significant additional advantages for the United States:

First, it could position Washington and Moscow to press China to freeze or limit its build-up of nuclear arms as long as the United States and Russia are reducing their nuclear arsenals. 

Second, such an agreement could give the Pentagon additional resources to support wider force modernization requirements for nuclear and conventional forces alike, including new ballistic missile submarines and the B-21 bomber. If we have the forces to deter conventional conflict, we dramatically reduce the prospect of nuclear war.

Third, such an agreement would bolster America’s non-proliferation credentials and leadership. A new U.S.-Russia nuclear arms reductions treaty may not lead North Korea to abandon its nuclear program overnight, but it would increase the ability of U.S. diplomats to urge third countries to pressure and sanction outliers such as North Korea.

Right-sizing U.S. and global nuclear arsenals strengthens deterrence, reduces proliferation risks, and lowers the threat of nuclear war to the United States and our allies. The Biden administration has an opportunity to reduce that risk. It should seize it.

Rep. Ami Bera, D-Calif., is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, Central Asia, and Nonproliferation. Steven Pifer is a William J. Perry Research Fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Originally for Defense One

This essay was originally published by East Asia Forum.

Nuclear-powered submarines for Australia was the most eye-catching part of the announcement of ‘AUKUS’, the new trilateral security initiative joining Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The eight new boats would greatly extend the range, endurance and firepower of Australia’s submarine fleet. They would break the taboo against nuclear power in Australia. And they show that the United States and the United Kingdom are committed to strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific.

But while AUKUS shows a seriousness about naval power, it shows an even greater seriousness about alliances. The trilateral initiative seeks to expand an existing alliance structure — the Five Eyes intelligence alliance — into the field of leading-edge defense technology and industry. AUKUS goes much deeper than submarines — but it cannot do everything.

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The Biden administration promised to prioritize strategic competition with China, and to reinvigorate Washington’s alliances. Progress on this has been positive, but incremental. Aside from some high-level visits, Biden’s most notable initiative was elevating the Quad — comprising Australia, India, Japan and the United States — to the summit level.

AUKUS is qualitatively different. The submarine deal alone enmeshes the United States and United Kingdom into the region for decades. But more ambitiously, beyond submarines, AUKUS seeks to win the technology competition with China by pooling resources and integrating supply chains for defense-related science, industry, and supply chains. This will be the decades-long and multifaceted purpose of AUKUS — a transnational project racing to seize advantages in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and cyber technology.

This kind of technology integration is a radical idea. Countries often share military technology, but some technologies are more highly prized than others. Nuclear technology is in a class of its own. The United States has only shared its nuclear submarine technology with the United Kingdom — at the height of the Cold War. The United States is now so animated by competition with China that it will share the technology with one more country, Australia, for the first time in decades.

The technologies at the heart of AUKUS are at the cutting edge of scientific research, and promise to deliver unprecedented advantages in military power. The submarine project will likely serve as a forcing function to drive much of this new collaboration. It is still unclear how much of the submarines’ nuclear propulsion technology will be shared with Australia, but the Australian defense community will almost certainly gain access to the submarines’ other state-of-the-art technologies, including sensors and data-processing systems for maritime domain awareness and tracking and evading adversary forces.

What makes the United Kingdom and Australia Washington’s most valued technology partners? They are members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which over decades has developed joint systems, organizations and processes for sharing collection responsibilities and intelligence data.

Less tangibly, but at least as importantly, this has cultivated mutual trust and habits of cooperation, including through the past two decades combating terrorism and fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Compared to the other Five Eyes members, Canada and New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia are also demonstrably more committed to upholding the strategic vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific.

AUKUS’s radical integration could only be possible among Five Eyes partners because AUKUS will be working on extremely sensitive intelligence-related technologies that Washington would only entrust to its closest intelligence partners. AUKUS’s stated technology priorities — artificial intelligence, quantum computing and cyber — are technologies that are at the forefront of emerging intelligence capabilities. Little wonder that several Australian intelligence chiefs have been front and center explaining AUKUS to Australia’s other strategic partners.

This is probably also why France was excluded from the grouping, prompting a sudden and ugly diplomatic spat. Despite its likeminded interests in the region, and despite its military power and activism, France does not share the systems and relationships that define the Five Eyes. In the years to come, AUKUS will gain greater regional acceptance and utility if it figures out how to share some of its prized defense technology and data with other partners, including France and others in the region.

AUKUS may represent the closest integration among partners, but it cannot do everything, and it cannot replace other groupings. The region requires a new security architecture, but unlike Cold War umbrellas like NATO, this architecture will comprise multiple, overlapping groupings, each with different roles and strengths. AUKUS’s technology-sharing mission is invaluable, but it is limited.

Different groupings serve different purposes. The Quad will remain critical for coordinating the strategic policies of China’s most powerful regional competitors, for presenting a common vision of regional order, and for acting as the nucleus for broader cooperation when needed. At its first in-person summit last week, the Quad reiterated its broad vision of promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific. And as the Indian government recently declared, AUKUS does not compete with or undermine the Quad.

Other partners like France and India cannot be full members of AUKUS, but they are indispensable in other roles that AUKUS cannot replicate. They each have significant military power, valuable geographic advantages and abiding networks of influence. And they are each vigorously engaged in the region, including through bilateral and trilateral partnerships with Australia.

The members of AUKUS should therefore work hard to repair their relationships with France because broad overlapping partnerships are a key asset in strategic competition with China. But not all regional challenges require a broad, inclusive approach. AUKUS’s declared objectives are radical — unseen in the firmament of US alliances, and certainly unseen in the region — and only possible precisely because the initiative is so exclusive.