The United States is facing a novel and even more challenging version of the problems that past cohorts of policymakers confronted during the Cold War. The United States must now simultaneously deter two nuclear peers –something it has never done. China and Russia are developing and deploying capabilities that could threaten the U.S. nuclear system. The potential that they might take joint, concerted action further complicates the calculus of deterrence. As a result, U.S. government officials are facing an issue that last bedeviled their predecessors some 40 years ago –the prospect of nuclear decapitation.
In The Three-Body Problem, Eric Edelman provides an overview of Chinese and Russian nuclear capabilities and the importance of modernizing not just America’s nuclear forces but also its system of nuclear command, control, and communication (NC3). NC3 is the key enabler of any effort to incorporate nuclear weapons into a national defense strategy because it provides positive and negative control of a nuclear force. In the past, NC3 has been often neglected, but the growing strategic cooperation between Russia and China underscores the primacy of NC3 modernization in the face of a growing threat of nuclear decapitation.