US Must Expand Nuclear Arsenal to Win New ‘Cold War’ With China: Report

An F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet landing on the deck of the US Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, during a NATO vigilance activity NEPTUNE SHIELD 2022 (NESH22) on eastern Mediterranean Sea, on May 23, 2022. Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images

The United States is in a Cold War with China’s communist regime and must take immediate steps to counter the threat and defend itself, according to a new report.

Decisive and sweeping action is necessary to prevent authoritarian revision to the world order from happening, according to “Winning the New Cold War: A Plan for Countering China,” published by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation.

“China envisions a world in which they are the world’s most powerful nation,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) at a March 28 launch event for the report.

“We are in a conflict with a nation state that doesn’t just seek to replace us, they seek to reorient the world.”

Rubio framed the ongoing struggle with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a civilizational struggle between the values of individual rights and collectivist totalitarianism, and one that would determine the character of the next century.

“We are living in a hinge moment in history that will define the 21st century,” Rubio said.

“That’s the conflict we face: freedom versus totalitarianism.”

Report: US in New ‘Cold War’

The Heritage report is designed as a comprehensive plan to protect the U.S. homeland, advance American prosperity, diminish the CCP’s influence, and reestablish U.S. leadership abroad.

It consists of more than a hundred operational policy proposals and proposed changes to U.S. strategic and diplomatic policy, which the foundation believes are essential to winning the new Cold War.

The Biden administration does not, however, recognize the ongoing conflict with the CCP as a cold war, and instead refers to it as “strategic competition.”

The report takes aim at that belief first.

“While U.S. officials have been reluctant to frame the rivalry with China in these terms, their apprehension ignores a simple reality: China adopted a Cold War strategy against the U.S. long ago,” the report said.

“Ultimately, however, China is foremost an Oval Office problem: The U.S. President must exercise leadership in directing a national plan, as the President’s predecessors did during World War II and the Cold War. The President must galvanize Congress to act.”

Heritage staffers took issue with that reluctance, saying that the multi-front conflict between the United States and CCP was the textbook definition of a cold war.

“This is what a Cold War is,” said Jeff Smith, director of Heritage’s Asian Studies Center. “Conflict across multiple fronts falling short of military conflict.”

To that end, Smith noted that improving the United States’ defense posture and strategy with regard to China was a central theme of the report. Preventing the CCP from bringing the new cold war into a hot war he said, the United States needed to ensure it had the firepower necessary to hold the regime at real risk.

As such, he said, expanding and modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal was essential “to ensure that the Chinese Communist Party believes that a war with the United States would be absolutely catastrophic.”

US Must ‘Take Fight’ to CCP

To ensure the United States maintained that strategic advantage, it needs to rapidly expand and enhance its nuclear capabilities, including by fielding sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles the report said.

A “strong nuclear deterrent,” said Heritage’s Vice President for National Security and Foreign Policy James Carafano, would be necessary to slow the CCP’s march towards nuclear parity with the United States.

“China is sending a message to the world that nuclear weapons are an important way to intimidate the world, and so they’re building up their nuclear arsenal,” Carafano said.

Carafano said part of that effort meant leaving the New START agreement, which limits how many warheads the United States and Russia can deploy, though Russia recently unilaterally suspended its involvement in the program.

Such a state of affairs was untenable, he said, given the United States’ need to now deter both China and Russia from nuclear aggression simultaneously.

“We’ve never endorsed the New START treaty,” Carafano said. “It created this false sense of control. It was consciously blind to the fact that it didn’t apply to Chinese capabilities at all.”

“We think that the United States needs to look into developing a strategic nuclear arsenal that thinks about China and Russia, not China or Russia.”

With that in mind, Carafano said that it was not enough for the United States to simply back away from its engagement with the CCP. Rather, he said, the United States would need to invest in the capabilities required to carry the battle to the regime.

“You cannot just protect the United States from China by just walling off or disengaging,” Carafano said. “You cannot protect the United States by just playing defense.

“You have to take the fight against the Chinese Communist Party.”