The year is 1979. A young senator from Delaware walks into the Kremlin to discuss nuclear arms control amid the Cold War. He would go on to be an outspoken advocate for nuclear nonproliferation and arms control for most of his long career. Fast forward to 2017: The same man emphatically stated, “As a nation, I believe we must keep pursuing the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons—because that is the only surety we have against the nightmare scenario becoming reality.”
But today, the proliferation of nuclear weapons has only accelerated. A single detonated warhead would still plunge the world into an unequivocal hell. Arms control works to mitigate this risk by building confidence among all governments that nuclear powers hold the mutual belief that nuclear wars can never be won and must never be fought.
Yet that senator—President Joe Biden—seems to have changed his priorities right as he stepped into the role of commander-in-chief. While the subtleties of Biden’s nuclear proliferation policy pale in comparison to former President Donald Trump’s brash and unpredictable nuclear musings, Biden’s ideological discontinuity on nuclear weapons should nonetheless be scrutinized. Neglect of arms control is not neutral. Biden has doomed the current arms control regime to a silent death as the United States and the world rapidly forget their commitment to the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.
The nuclear landscape in 2020 did not evoke optimism, largely due to many Trump-era policy changes. Iran had stopped limiting its uranium enrichment and severely curtailed International Atomic Energy Agency inspections in the wake of the United States reneging on the Iran nuclear deal two years prior. The United States had withdrawn from several key arms control agreements, and negotiations over others had fallen through. The Pentagon had reversed a decade-long policy of disclosing how many nuclear weapons were in its arsenal with no explanation.
Still, Biden lived up to the title of “lifelong champion of nuclear arms control” during his presidential campaign. He advocated for reduced reliance on nuclear weapons, suggested budget cuts to the Trump administration’s nuclear spending, and shifted to a “no first use” policy. Promises of a return to the Iran nuclear deal and prioritization of denuclearizing North Korea left many nuclear security experts hopeful that the next administration would be a step in the right direction for nonproliferation.
A president who had long supported nonproliferation and appeared to understand the importance of arms control in making the world safer seemed sure to promote progress. In particular, many anticipated cuts to the over $1.7 trillion nuclear modernization program that had bloated under Trump. The program proposed building new types of nuclear weapons to “expand” deterrence options, despite proponents providing no evidence that current capabilities were insufficient. Near the beginning of his administration, Biden initiated a months-long review of US nuclear strategy by the Pentagon, producing the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). For those watching to see how Biden would approach nuclear issues, this was his opportunity to set American nuclear policy back on the track of arms reduction.
Yet, the opposite happened. The United States still reserves the right to the first use of nuclear weapons, and Biden moved forward with the nuclear modernization program, which today is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. What changed?
Soon after entering the Oval Office, Biden was confronted with a tumultuous international security landscape: a warmongering Russia, an increasingly belligerent China, and a perennially destabilized Middle East. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a major nuclear power had turned its revisionist aims into military aggression against a sovereign state. In the face of this new reality of emerging threats and noncooperation, Biden and his administration have prioritized increasing capabilities over arms control.
Compounding the pressure on Biden to continue strengthening the American nuclear arsenal was the threat posed by China’s expanding and diversifying nuclear capabilities. The 2022 NPR explicitly mentioned China as “the overall pacing challenge for US defense planning and a growing factor in evaluating our nuclear deterrent.” To many in the national security sphere, having a strong nuclear deterrent seemed much more pressing than arms control, and the Biden administration agreed.
However, arms control cannot wait until strategic competition has subsided and international security challenges are resolved. Biden’s advocacy as a senator during the height of the Cold War was a powerful statement on the importance of nuclear arms control in mitigating risk, especially in the face of great power competition. Today, that competition has returned. Nearly all nuclear states are growing their arsenals, and the world’s major powers are engaged in an arms race that no one in power seems to want to stop.
The United States is actively contributing to the escalation of the arms race instead of trying to curtail it, signaling to competitors like Russia and China that it is no longer interested in the stability of mutually assured destruction and would rather try to gain nuclear superiority. This prompts adversaries to believe that one day, their opponent might strike them first. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson recently accused the United States of being the aggressor, pointing to its nuclear modernization and first-use policy. No nuclear-armed country seems to believe that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” and the mutual understanding of the stability of deterrence appears to be dead.
Today, we are building new weapons, and America is not any safer. Adding new weapons has not and will not fundamentally change America’s ability to deter attacks. Rather, massively increasing our arsenal has caused a costly and destabilizing cycle of convincing every other adversary to do the same. With each dollar poured into building a new submarine or innovating a new missile, the risk of one day having to use them grows.
After a Trump presidency that destabilized nuclear norms, the United States needed a stabilizing Biden administration that reestablished a commitment to arms control. Biden had the opportunity to reverse course when he entered office and have the United States resume its place as a leader in nonproliferation efforts. Instead, he failed to reverse other nations’ beliefs that the world’s leading superpower—and the only country to have ever used a nuclear weapon—is no longer committed to arms control, nor should they be.
This is how Biden has helped to passively usher in an era where, in his own words, we are once again facing “the prospect of Armageddon.” Joe Biden, once a champion of arms control, went silent at the culmination of his long career. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, that is Biden’s nuclear legacy.