Thread by @StephenUCS

BREAKING: The Biden administration's #Nuclear Posture Review, just released, is a terrifying document. It not only keeps the world on a path of increasing nuclear risk, in many ways it increases that risk. Here it is: media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/20…

Citing rising threats from Russia & China, it argues the only viable U.S. response is to rebuild the entire US nuclear arsenal, maintain an array of dangerous Cold War-era nuclear policies, & threaten the first use of nuclear weapons in a variety of scenarios.

This NPR does not reflect the sensible steps President Biden proposed as a candidate to reduce the nuclear threat, as he did when asked about No First Use by a UCS activist:

Instead, the document says US has no choice but to build all-new nuclear weapons, despite science-based findings that warheads in the arsenal will be reliable for decades to come with only modest maintenance efforts. Here's the science: irp.fas.org/agency/dod/jas…

The NPR abandons the pledge Biden made on the campaign trail to support a "no first use" policy and declare that the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attacks on the United States and its allies. This document merely sets that as a goal.

The NPR endorses the new, lower-yield W76-2 warhead produced by the Trump administration that the 2020 Democratic Platform called “unnecessary, wasteful, and indefensible.” See democrats.org/where-we-stand…

The NPR argues that sensors will detect incoming nuclear-armed missiles quickly enough to “ensure a deliberative process allowing the President sufficient time to gather information and consider courses of action.”

To the Biden administration's credit, the NPR does declare US nuclear forces “are postured to withstand an initial attack,” meaning the president could wait until after any incoming nuclear attack hits, rather than being required to launch before impact. That is good.

However, US nuclear forces are designed so @POTUS could have 10 minutes to decide the fate of humanity, from when the 1st warning comes until incoming warheads explode. There is no coming back from a launch based on faulty information or made by a president unhinged from reality.

NPR also explicitly rejects the reality that U.S. land-based missiles are on “hair trigger” alert, arguing disingenuously that those long-range systems are on “day-to-day alert," which sounds so reassuring.

The reality is, one phone call from @POTUS issuing a code shorter than a tweet could launch of hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles in less than 5 minutes, which would hit targets in less than 1/2 hour with warheads 20 more destructive than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima

The NPR does repeatedly state that the US would like to reduce the role that nuclear weapons play in US security policy – one of the major goals of the Obama administration’s NPR as well – but it almost entirely fails to do so.

It does seek to cancel the new, unneeded nuclear-armed Sea-Launched Cruise Missile (SLCM-N) proposed in the Trump administration’s NPR, though high-level military officials testifying in favor of the cruise missile is leading Congress to fund the program anyway.

And NPR retires the B83 gravity bomb, roughly 80 times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb. Indiscriminate destruction & radioactive fallout that would result should make the B83 unusable. Biden administration should work hard to ensure Congress implements those decisions.

But the NPR misses the fundamental problem. Yes, the world is becoming a more dangerous place, but the only military threat to the survival of the United States is a nuclear war with Russia or China.

Rather than recognizing that threat and seeking to find ways to end it, the Biden NPR doubles down on nuclear deterrence and the status quo approach to security that says we all must be prepared to die in less than an hour.

That is not a world any of us should want to live in. We need to find a new approach to security, one that can address tragedies like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but that does not require humanity to live in constant peril.

Such a world is possible, and the Biden administration should immediately begin strenuous efforts to create that outcome.