StratCom conference in Omaha warns of nuclear threats growing in Far East

China’s growing nuclear capabilities are on the minds of many of the nearly 700 military and civilian experts attending the U.S. Strategic Command’s annual Deterrence Symposium this week at the CHI Health Center in Omaha.

So is North Korea’s increasing success and confidence in its nuclear program.

“The most likely place where nuclear weapons will be used in battle is the Korean peninsula, not Ukraine,” said Markus Garlauskas, director of the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Garlauskas said he and his colleagues had played out tabletop exercises in which a conflict between the U.S. and North Korea spreads to China, with which it shares a border. That could happen because of a simple miscommunication between the two neighbors’ leaders.

“It’s a real possibility,” he said. “The consequences are so dramatic, we really have to take this risk seriously.”

Rick Chancellor, chief of the Defense Counterproliferation Office at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, said the nuclear threat is far more complex than when he served as a young Air Force captain at StratCom’s Offutt Air Force Base headquarters in the early 2000s.

“Now we see this very complex atmosphere that is more than just Russia,” Chancellor said.

He noted that Russia has modernized its entire nuclear arsenal since 2010. Its leaders have lately proposed six new weapons systems, five of them nuclear.

At the same time, he said, China is developing new submarine-launched cruise missiles and has set a goal of stockpiling 1,000 weapons by the end of the decade.

While Russia and the U.S. have been constrained by arms control treaties for decades, China has not signed any.

“We are past Cold War 2.0,” Chancellor said.

Gen. Anthony Cotton, StratCom’s commander, sounded the same alarm as his two most recent predecessors, Adm. Charles Richard and Gen. John Hyten, about the perils of squaring off in a nuclear showdown with both Russia and China.

“For the first time, the United States is going to be deterring two near-peer adversaries,” Cotton said.

While those nations may have some shared interests, he said, America has true allies in Europe and the Pacific. Fourteen of them are represented at the symposium.

“It’s the strength of our alliances and partnerships that gives us an asymmetric advantage,” Cotton said.

Still, he said, the defense of the U.S. and its allies depends on an aging nuclear umbrella that is only now being modernized — years behind their rivals.

“We’re not seeing any indication that they are slowing down,” Cotton said.

He noted that new U.S. weapons systems like the Sentinel ICBM, the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine and the B-21 bomber, though late getting started, at least have not fallen any further behind schedule.

“We’re in the beginnings of our modernization, and I’m comfortable with where we are,” Cotton said. “It’s a safe, secure, credible deterrent.”

But, he added, there is no room for delay.

“(With these systems), it’s not a ‘Should we?’” Cotton said. “It’s a ‘We must.’”