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Floor Speech

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Mrs. FISCHER. Mr. President, earlier this month, the commanders of the U.S. Strategic Command and the U.S. Space Command, ADM Charles Richard and GEN James Dickinson, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee for their annual posture hearing.

The backdrop for their testimony was two twin challenges facing the United States and our allies: Putin's desire to recreate the Russian Empire, demonstrated most recently in his unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, and China's plan to massively expand their power, rolling back U.S. influence in the process.

Both of these American adversaries are expanding their nuclear arsenals to back up their ambitions.

As ranking member of the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces and with STRATCOM's headquarters in my State of Nebraska, I appreciated this chance to engage with Admiral Richard on such an important issue.

As the commander of STRATCOM, Admiral Richard has one of the highest pressure jobs in the world--overseeing America's nuclear forces. He knows better than anyone how important our nuclear deterrent is to preventing war around the world, and he understands the threat posed by our adversaries' growing arsenals.

Admiral Richard told the Armed Services Committee that Putin's war in Ukraine is giving us ``a very vivid real-world example of the importance of extended deterrence.'' What he meant by that is that, even though Putin has brought a major war back to Europe for the first time since the end of World War II and heartbreaking destruction to the people of Ukraine, nuclear deterrence, including the extended deterrence commitments that we provide our allies, has shielded NATO countries and discouraged the conflict's spread. More specifically, without our nuclear deterrent, our plans to protect American citizens and our allies would fall apart.

Take it straight from Admiral Richard. He said:

Every operational plan in the Department of Defense, and every other capability we have, rests on the assumption that strategic deterrence is holding, and in particular that nuclear deterrence is holding.

If strategic or nuclear deterrence fails, no other plan and no other capability in the Department of Defense is going to work as designed.

When people who care about a safe and secure America say that strategic deterrence, especially nuclear deterrence, is the bedrock of our national security, that is exactly what we mean because, at the end of the day, American strength is the only thing that tyrants like Putin actually respect.

Just as we need to reassess our approach to Putin in light of his invasion of Ukraine, we also need to rethink our approach to our nuclear deterrent. Barely 2 months ago, on January 3, the five members of the U.N. Security Council released a joint declaration on ``Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races.'' Russia, of course, is one of those five members.

People who want our deterrence to continue aging while Russia and China modernize their own forces, including many members of the media, rushed to hail the joint statement as a long-awaited and revolutionary breakthrough. They seemed certain that we had turned a corner and that by signing this statement, we were ushering in a new and enduring era of world peace.

I was skeptical. I wrote an op-ed in National Review Online that responded to what I called the ``delusional'' parts of that statement and the wishful thinking that led the United States to sign our name next to those of Russia and China.

More than a month before Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, I wrote:

This would be a historic moment for international unity--or rather, it would be if it were true. China and Russia may have signed this document, but they do not intend to honor it.

They clearly did not.

Since then, Russia has put their deterrent on high alert, essentially threatening to use their nukes against the other countries that signed that statement. I believe it was clear to anyone who had been paying attention that signing our names to a feel-good piece of paper wasn't actually going to change anything about Putin's behavior or the behavior of China.

While our deterrent remains effective, we are asking it to protect against a growing range of threats. Russia is continuing the deadliest war in Europe in nearly a century, and the Chinese Communist Party-- well, they are hard at work expanding their own nuclear arsenal. And they are doing it at a pace we have never seen in world history.

I asked Admiral Richard about the U.S. intelligence community's estimate that China plans to potentially quadruple their nuclear arsenal by the year 2030. He told the committee:

Last fall, I formally reported to the Secretary of Defense the PRC's strategic breakout. Their expansion and modernization in 2021 alone is breathtaking. And the concern I expressed in my testimony last April has now become a reality.

China is attempting a rapid buildup of unprecedented scope and scale, and we have no reason to think they will stop once they reach the Pentagon's estimate. We have even less reason to think it will take China 8 more years to grow their stockpile to 1,000 deliverable warheads.

Admiral Richard agreed. In response to my questioning, he said:

Whatever the time estimate that the intelligence community gives you on anything from China, divide it by two and maybe by four and you will get closer to the right answer.

So, no, I don't know that we have any idea of [China's] endpoint and/or speed.

And as Admiral Richard pointed out at another point in the hearing, many observers have gotten too caught up on the ``1,000 by 2030'' figure.

Since the Pentagon released their report in November of last year, an unspoken assumption has developed that China will simply stop building nukes once they reach that point, whether that is in 2025 or 2030. But let me point out, the Chinese Communist Party has given us no reason to think that that might be the case.

In fact, given their ambitions to take Taiwan and develop a Chinese sphere of influence beyond Asia, I think it is very likely they will continue building far beyond that number.

And even as China works to expand its nuclear arsenal, ours is rapidly aging. The United States has not designed or built a new nuclear warhead since the end of the Cold War. We don't even have the ability to produce a new warhead right now, and we are the only nuclear power unable to do so. China and Russia can. The United Kingdom can. France can. And India and Pakistan can. Even North Korea can.

But here in the United States, we cannot. Instead, we have focused on extending the life of our current systems. This has pushed our deterrent far beyond its designed lifetime and made the need for modernization even more acute.

Admiral Richard went out of his way to stress this point during his testimony. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee:

Right now, I am executing my strategic deterrence mission under historic stress, crisis levels of deterrence, crisis deterrence dynamics that we've only seen a couple of times in our nation's history.

And I'm doing it with submarines built in the '80s and '90s, an air-launched cruise missile built in the '80s, intercontinental ballistic missiles built in the '70s, a bomber built in the '60s, part of our nuclear command and control that predates the internet, and a nuclear weapons complex that dates back to the Manhattan era.

We have ignored the need to modernize our deterrence for far too long. As Admiral Richard said at another point during his testimony: The nuclear force we have today is the absolute minimum we need to guarantee our security.

The world has only gotten more dangerous over the past decade, and the last few weeks in Ukraine are the latest evidence of that.

But Washington--well, Washington has spent that time procrastinating.

Our failure to make tough decisions has left Admiral Richard with a deterrent that simply hasn't kept up with those of our adversaries. The final piece of Admiral Richard's testimony I will read is this:

We have reached a point where we can no longer deter with the leftovers of the Cold War. We have life extended them to the maximum extent possible.

We must now start to recapitalize, remanufacture those that require a very robust infrastructure . . . We're 10 years behind the point where we needed to start recapitalizing the infrastructure . . . And the consequence is we simply won't have the capabilities that we are going to have to have to deter the threat environment we're in.

We cannot keep kicking the can down the road. We are not in the 1990s or the 2000s anymore. The threat environment is changing, and we have no choice but to keep up. But our nuclear deterrent is sized based on the 2010 New START Treaty, written in a very different world, before Putin decided to behave like a war criminal and before China's unprecedented nuclear breakout.

To wrap up, I would like to draw my colleagues' attention to an exchange from the Foreign Relations Committee's hearings during the ratification process for the New START Treaty.

Responding to a question about whether the posture set by the treaty left the United States with nuclear forces beyond what we needed, the STRATCOM commander at the time, GEN Kevin Chilton, completely rejected that idea. He said instead:

I think the arsenal that we have is exactly what is needed today to provide the deterrent.

We need to think long and hard about if a deterrent designed around the threats of 2010 is still what is needed for the very different and much more dangerous world we live in now.

I hope the administration will address that question in its upcoming Nuclear Posture Review. In fact, the upcoming fiscal year budget and various strategy documents we expect to be released soon, including the NPR, are a chance for the administration to show that they do understand the challenges that we face. Most fundamentally, that is the erosion of global stability and the increasingly challenging threat environment facing our country.

These documents are an opportunity for President Biden to propose a realistic plan to meet these threats. I hope that he will. The hard truth is that every day that we refuse to commit to the modernization schedule today's world needs is a day that Russia and China become greater threats. They get further ahead.

If we wait too long, we are going to wake up 5, 10, 20 years from now with no way to deter adversaries who did commit to modernization. That is not a position anyone wants to wind up in.

We need to act like adults and make difficult choices to prioritize our nuclear deterrent, the most fundamental part of our defense strategy. And we have to keep modernization on schedule in the FY2023 NDAA.

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