The Pentagon’s new nuclear doctrine needs congressional guardrails 

For more than three decades, American nuclear strategy rested on the assumption that U.S. weapons capable of ending civilization several times over would deter adversaries from crossing the nuclear threshold. That assumption is now being tested. 

According to NBC News, and broadly confirmed by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, the Department of Defense is drafting a nuclear strategy that places far greater weight on shorter-range, lower-yield tactical weapons in a regional conflict with Russia or China.

This is not, as Moscow’s and Beijing’s propagandists claim, a march toward nuclear war. It is an acknowledgment that America’s deterrent has a credibility gap, and that gap has been widening for years. 

Here’s the uncomfortable part: the logic behind the reassessment is sound. America’s current posture forces any president into a binary choice — absorb a limited nuclear strike on an ally or retaliate in a way that risks Armageddon. 

Vladimir Putin’s generals have spent two decades developing an “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine, using small battlefield nuclear weapons to shock NATO into freezing a conflict, betting Washington would blink rather than trade New York for Warsaw. Beijing has built a rapidly expanding force of theater-range missiles capable of similar coercive signaling against Taiwan and Japan. If Washington’s only response to a tactical provocation is total strategic war, its deterrent deters very little. 

Colby has been walking a careful line. At STRATCOM’s Deterrence Symposium in Omaha this month, he called the effort a “relook” at deployment guidance rather than a policy announcement. Days later he went the other way, telling reporters the goal is “to maintain deterrence and stability rather than to exacerbate it.” Either........

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