The United States is rapidly moving into a new era that will force it to confront some of the most complex and challenging questions about nuclear weapons since the dawn of the nuclear age. We will soon be in a world where Russia and China each possess nuclear arsenals on par with the United States’—and where the probability of great-power war is growing.
As the Strategic Posture Commission established by Congress noted in 2023, this is “an existential challenge for which the United States is ill-prepared, unless its leaders make decisions now to adjust the U.S. strategic posture.” One essential element of this challenge involves ensuring that the national command authority—the ability of the U.S. president and key military advisors to be in communication with U.S. nuclear (and conventional) forces at all times—remains intact and protected. This is a critical element of deterrence: If a nuclear-armed enemy perceives the command structure to be vulnerable, it may consider attempting a nuclear decapitation strike.
Today, the United States faces not only Russia’s nuclear forces but also a Chinese nuclear arsenal that is growing at an unprecedented rate. Beijing’s nuclear force, which experts estimated at roughly 200 warheads a few years ago, has already tripled to some 600 warheads today. Moreover, the most recent U.S. Defense Department report on the Chinese military, released in December 2024, suggests that Beijing is on its way to more than 1,000 warheads by 2030. No wonder that in 2021, the then-head of U.S. Strategic Command, Adm. Charles Richard, described the growth of the Chinese arsenal as “breathtaking.” (Under the terms of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expiring in 2026, the United States and Russia are each allowed to deploy 1,550 warheads, but these numbers are less important for protecting the command structure than the exotic nuclear capabilities that Washington’s adversaries have been developing.)
The Chinese buildup has given rise to discussion of the so-called three-body problem: How can one nuclear power simultaneously deter two nuclear peers?
Further complicating this complex situation is tightening cooperation between Russia and China. U.S. nuclear planners face not only the challenge of simultaneously deterring two adversaries and the risks of opportunistic aggression, but they also need to plan for the possibility of a combined Sino-Russian nuclear attack. Actions such as the recent joint Chinese-Russian strategic bomber patrols near Alaska demonstrate that this is not just a theoretical concern.
Of particular concern is the fact that both China and Russia are developing—and in some cases deploying—capabilities that could threaten the United States’ nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) system. These capabilities include anti-satellite systems, cyberweapons, and hypersonic delivery vehicles that have been designed to evade U.S. missile defenses.
These emerging capabilities raise a specter that the U.S. government has not had to face for at least 35 years: the prospect of nuclear decapitation. As recently as 2013, the Obama administration’s report on the U.S. nuclear employment strategy concluded that the nation faced a “significantly diminished possibility of a disarming surprise nuclear attack.” Today, Russian and Chinese capabilities have created a dramatically different situation.
A nuclear decapitation attack would seek to eliminate the U.S. president and his or her designated successors—the so-called National Command Authority—and to damage the NC3 system to the extent that it prevents a U.S. retaliatory response. The possibility of such a decapitation attack, however slight, “is probably the only imaginable route to decisive victory in nuclear war,” international relations scholar John Steinbruner wrote in Foreign Policy in 1981. U.S. nuclear planners learned during the Cold War that a robust nuclear deterrent must rely not only on assured means of delivering nuclear weapons but also on an equally robust NC3 system. “Weapons and strategic doctrine are meaningless,” future U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter observed in 1985, without “the means to know what is happening in the chaos of crisis or war, to provide for decisions by legitimate authorities and to have orders carried out precisely and faithfully.”
Failure to fully fund ongoing efforts to modernize the U.S. NC3 system could encourage the illusion among the United States’ nuclear adversaries that a decapitating first strike might succeed.
This is not a far-fetched theory. Beijing clearly sees counter-space operations a way to “blind and deafen the enemy,” according to the Pentagon report. It has tested a direct-ascent anti-satellite weapon that left tens of thousands of pieces of space debris in orbit; it subsequently launched a rocket that apparently reached its apogee at roughly 30,000 kilometers, which U.S. officials believe was probably a test to intercept a geosynchronous satellite. Beijing has deployed multiple ground-based lasers that can currently “disrupt, degrade, or damage” space-based sensors and ultimately destroy satellites. Recently, China has reportedly had some of its satellites engage in “dogfighting” in space.
In July 2021, China tested a system that would appear to provide it with a capability akin to the fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS) that the Soviet Union developed during the Cold War. The main advantage of such a system, and virtually its only use, is to conduct a strike with little or no warning.
In January, the Financial Times reported that satellite photography had shown “deep holes that military experts assess will house large, hardened bunkers to protect Chinese military leaders during any conflict—including potentially a nuclear war.” This huge facility—about 10 times the size of the Pentagon—would be the “world’s largest military command centre” and, according to former U.S. intelligence officer Dennis Wilder, would provide China with an “advanced nuclear warfighting capability.”
For their part, Russian officials have said the country’s new heavy intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the Sarmat, is essentially a FOBS capability. Never one for subtlety, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a speech in 2018 that featured an animation of the system on a trajectory over the South Pole striking a target in Florida that was suspiciously close to U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Like China, Russia has tested an anti-satellite capability in the past several years. In November 2021, Russia destroyed a defunct Soviet-era communications satellite in low-Earth orbit using its Nudol direct-ascent anti-satellite missile; the test endangered other spacecraft, including the International Space Station and China’s Tiangong Space Station.
Most alarmingly, the Russians appear to be developing a satellite that would carry a nuclear weapon in space. U.S. and Soviet tests of nuclear weapons in space during the Cold War showed that such a weapon would threaten commercial satellites as well as military spacecraft. Russia’s April 2024 veto of a United Nations Security Council resolution reaffirming the Outer Space Treaty’s ban on nuclear weapons in space underscores concerns about Russian intentions.
Russia has also modernized its NC3. In 2011, the then-director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Gen. Ronald Burgess, testified before Congress that “Russia is upgrading massive underground facilities that provide command and control of its strategic nuclear forces.” In late 2020, Putin announced the completion of “an absolutely secure facility for controlling strategic nuclear forces … and that it will have a very high safety margin.”
Although Russia and China have spent the past decade and a half modernizing and expanding their nuclear forces and associated capabilities, the United States has only belatedly begun its nuclear modernization. The Defense Department is currently modernizing its early-warning radars and satellites, as well as its space-based communications systems. But several other elements of the NC3 system demand special attention to ensure their survivability.
First is what’s known as continuity of operations/continuity of government (COOP/COG). When the Carter and Reagan administrations faced the fears of decapitation that resulted from the Soviet nuclear buildup of the 1970s, they both moved to refresh and exercise COOP/COG procedures in case of nuclear attack, including direct participation or observation by senior officials, including President Ronald Reagan.
Subsequent administrations have largely let COOP/COG languish. The one exception was after 9/11, when the Bush administration gave it renewed attention in the face of potential government decapitation resulting from a terrorist attack. But as real and serious as that threat may be, it is of a totally different order than the risk represented by peer nuclear adversaries seeking to not only decapitate the U.S. government but the entire NC3 system.
A refresh of COOP/COG procedures would benefit by helping U.S. officials to understand the potential risks of nuclear decapitation as well as the fixed and mobile airborne facilities that exist to ensure the survival of the nation’s leaders and line of command.
The second element of NC3 requiring attention is the survivability of mobile alternate command posts. The United States has maintained several fixed sites as alternatives to the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center, including Stratcom’s Global Operations Center at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska; the Raven Rock Mountain Complex in Pennsylvania; and the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado, near the headquarters of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command.
These fixed sites, however, would be prime targets for any nuclear decapitation attempt. During the Cold War, the Kennedy administration determined that decapitating the U.S. leadership might require only a relatively small missile force. Ever since then, the United States has invested in an airborne component of the NC3 architecture to provide a survivable command center. These included the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, later replaced by the E-4B National Airborne Operations Center, as well as the Navy’s Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO) aircraft to provide a mechanism for connectivity in a crisis to the ballistic missile submarine fleet and an alternate airborne launch control system for ICBMs.
In today’s new context, the modernization of these mobile command posts is crucial to reinforcing deterrence by raising doubts about the effectiveness of decapitation as a strategy. This is particularly urgent given the heavy investment that Russia and China are making in counter-space capabilities. The U.S. Air Force is currently modernizing the E-4B National Airborne Operations Center through the Survivable Airborne Operations Center program, a $13 billion effort to replace, by 2036, legacy 1970s-era aircraft with a fleet of adapted civilian aircraft fitted out with modern communications, networks, and advanced command and control subsystems.
Meanwhile, the Navy is upgrading its TACAMO aircraft to extend their service life until 2038. The first block of upgraded aircraft was delivered in 2023 in nearly record time.
The challenge of deterring two nuclear peers simultaneously will continue to bedevil the United States for years to come. But the first order of business is to ensure that NC3 remains robust, the programs to support it are fully funded, and upgraded capabilities are delivered on time.