Ashley J. Tellis and Tong Zhao | Foreign Affairs
I appreciate Ashley Tellis’s thoughtful response to my essay and welcome broader debate on the motives of China’s nuclear buildup. In my essay, I suggested that China’s recent nuclear buildup is driven more by a directional mandate from the political leadership than by a new doctrine shaped by military strategists. Xi views nuclear weapons as having excessive coercive power beyond the military realm—prompting and propelling a nuclear expansion that lacks clearly defined military goals and suffers from internal disorientation and incoherence. This is where I disagree with Tellis: China’s new nuclear capabilities certainly have military utility, but none of the military goals that Tellis noted explains the buildup’s timing, scale, or scope.
Barak Ravid | Axios
U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies are looking into new information about computer modeling by Iranian scientists that could be used for research and development of nuclear weapons, two U.S. officials plus one current and one former Israeli official told Axios.The purpose of the modeling is unclear. Some U.S. and Israeli officials said the intelligence is a worrying signal about Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions, but other officials on both sides said it as a "blip" that doesn't represent a shift in Iran's policy and strategy towards weaponization. Iran has repeatedly denied wanting nuclear weapons.
Reuters
The Kremlin said on Monday a remark by NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg that the military alliance was holding talks on deploying more nuclear weapons was an "escalation of tension". Stoltenberg told Britain's Telegraph newspaper that NATO members were consulting about deploying more nuclear weapons, taking them out of storage and placing them on standby in the face of a growing threat from Russia and China.
Editor's Note: Jens Stoltenberg's remarks were inaccurately and misleadingly summarized in The Telegraph article to which the Kremlin was responding. A transcript of his comments is available here.
KIM TONG-HYUNG | Associated Press
Russian President Vladimir Putin thanked North Korea for supporting his actions in Ukraine and said their countries will cooperate closely to overcome U.S.-led sanctions as he headed to Pyongyang on Tuesday for a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un…Putin, who will be making his first trip to North Korea in 24 years, said he highly appreciates its firm support of his military action in Ukraine. He said the countries would continue to “resolutely oppose” what he described as Western ambitions “to hinder the establishment of a multipolar world order based on justice, mutual respect for sovereignty, considering each other’s interests.”
THERESA HITCHENS | Breaking Defense
Airborne lasers are back in the sights of the Missile Defense Agency — a decade after the first attempt to build a system collapsed, having swallowed 16 years and $5 billion in research and development. This time, however, MDA is taking things slow. Rather than jumping straight to shooting down missiles in space, the agency is first focusing on using low-powered lasers for tracking and working its way toward higher-powered systems for intercept.
SIPRI
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) today launches its annual assessment of the state of armaments, disarmament and international security. Key findings of SIPRI Yearbook 2024 are that the number and types of nuclear weapons in development have increased as states deepen their reliance on nuclear deterrence…The nine nuclear-armed states—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and Israel—continued to modernize their nuclear arsenals and several deployed new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapon systems in 2023.