(Bloomberg Opinion) -- More than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, nuclear war may be something to worry about. At the moment, tensions between India and Pakistan, North Korea’s small arsenal, Iran’s nuclear program, and the U.S. withdrawal from its treaty with Russia on intermediate-range nuclear missiles are all roiling the status quo of global security.
But the U.S. can best prepare for the next nuclear age by sticking with the two-pronged strategy that worked so well during the Cold War: deterrence combined with arms control. That means pursuing two seemingly contradictory goals: seeking to shrink the number of nuclear weapons around the globe, while simultaneously maintaining and improving a nuclear arsenal potent enough to dissuade adversaries from doing anything stupid.
The difference is that there are now three great powers involved. The U.S. needs to modernize its arsenal to counter rising threats from China and Russia, and pursue arms-control treaties with them both.
On the diplomatic side, President Trump should welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to extend the New START agreement, which drastically reduced overall U.S. and Russian arsenals but is set to expire in 2021. Eventually, China should be persuaded to join the pact. Though still well below the START limits, its arsenal is growing. And the U.S. should seek to renegotiate the abandoned Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty as a trilateral pact that also includes Beijing.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has much work to do to modernize its own nuclear-weapons systems. The military was helpfully promised upwards of $1 trillion over 30 years for the project.
The priority should be the submarine fleet, the leg of the U.S. nuclear triad that best combines stealth, mobility and accuracy. The Navy needs full funding to replace its aging Ohio-class ballistic-missile subs with the new Columbia class, scheduled to enter service in the early 2030s.
The ground-based leg of the triad consists of Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles in underground silos in the Great Plains. These would cause such vast damage, they would be useful only in the event of an existential crisis. Given this limitation, it makes little sense to entirely replace them. The Air Force should instead upgrade the Minuteman, and could cut its numbers considerably.
That leaves the air leg, which now depends on outdated stealth technology and archaic B-52 bombers. The Air Force is buying at least 100 B-21 Raiders, but unless this new long-range plane proves capable of penetrating ever-more-sophisticated air defenses, it won’t be more than a stopgap. Long term, the service needs to consider drones, air-launched missiles and other cutting-edge alternatives to manned planes.
At the same time, the Pentagon needs to upgrade the weapons themselves, placing a new emphasis on its stockpile of less-powerful tactical weapons that can be “dialed down” to lower yields. The enemy is more likely to fear that the U.S. will really use an atomic weapon if it is not as destructive as the one dropped on Hiroshima.
Russia has reportedly adopted a doctrine known as “escalate to de-escalate,” which involves using limited numbers of such lower-yield weapons to buy time in the event its conventional military finds itself overmatched by U.S. or Chinese troops. Of course, this approach gambles that there could be such a thing as limited nuclear war.
The Pentagon also needs to catch up with Russia and China in developing hypersonic glide missiles that can evade ground defenses after re-entering the atmosphere, and to work on missile defenses capable of destroying enemy vehicles at launch rather than in mid-course. To develop such a deterrent, the U.S. will first have to build a vast network of space-based detectors and greatly expand research on high-energy lasers.
Deterrence can be grim business, in that it involves building more deadly nuclear capacity. But this strategy has helped avert nuclear war between superpowers for decades. A 21st-century reboot should aim to do the same.
Editorials are written by the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board.
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