April 2026
By Xiaodon Liang

The U.S. Department of Defense is conducting a “nuclear strategy review” to assess strategic force requirements and potential additional theater nuclear weapons programs in lieu of a full nuclear posture review, a top department official said March 17 at a congressional hearing.

The review will be conducted by the office of the undersecretary of defense for policy and U.S. Strategic Command, according to Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary of defense for nuclear deterrence, chemical, and biological defense, policy and programs.

Kadlec, speaking before the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, said the review would assess “very specific issues as it relates to the two-peer problem”—as U.S. experts regularly describe China and Russia—and “the pace of modernization and sufficiency of what we have already in the programs of record.”

“People have asked about numbers,” Kadlec said, “and I think this is the first opportunity to really evaluate the threat in a way that is real and tangible.”

In a November 2024 report on the nuclear employment strategy, the Defense Department indicated that it had received guidance from the Biden administration to “continuously evaluate whether adjustments should be made” to the U.S. nuclear force.

Kadlec said that ongoing work to assess additional theater nuclear weapons options would focus on “using the existing stockpile and existing platforms,” in response to a question from the subcommittee chair, Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), about “tailored supplemental capabilities” to the existing nuclear force.

Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, previously told the Senate Armed Services Committee March 3 that the Trump administration would not be conducting a formal nuclear posture review. “I think the declaratory policy and so forth from the first Trump term was very good,” Colby said.

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review produced by the first Trump administration differed from its predecessor, the 2010 review conducted by the Obama administration, in declaring that the “extreme circumstances” under which the United States might contemplate nuclear use could include “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks.” (See ACT, March 2018.)

The Biden administration did not fully reject this change but indicated that this set of contingencies consisted of a “narrow range of other high consequence, strategic-level attacks.”

The Biden review also noted that “a near-simultaneous conflict with two nuclear-armed states would constitute an extreme circumstance.”

In his prepared statement for the March 17 hearing, Kadlec wrote that U.S. nuclear forces must be “robust enough to deter both peers simultaneously, even if we were to be engaged in a major conventional conflict with one.”

“The role of our nuclear arsenal in this context is not to fight and win a nuclear war, but to deter China from escalating to the nuclear level in the first place, or from believing it can use its nuclear arsenal to coerce us into accepting a fait accompli,” Kadlec wrote.

Testifying alongside Kadlec, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, Adm. Richard Correll, expressed concern about the potential vulnerabilities exposed by Ukraine’s successful drone strike against Russian strategic forces last June. Correll indicated in his prepared statement that a Pentagon council had endorsed his command’s new requirements for addressing this threat. (See ACT, July/August 2025.)

Drones controlled by unidentified remote operators were sighted intruding into the airspace of Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, between March 9 and 15, ABC News reported March 20, citing a confidential internal briefing document on the incidents.

Barksdale is home to three squadrons of B-52H strategic bombers. A nuclear weapons storage site is under construction at the base, according to satellite imagery analysis by the Federation of American Scientists.

Multiple waves of drones flew over sensitive portions of the base for more than a week. The aircraft displayed “non-commercial signal characteristics, long-range control links and resistance to jamming,” according to the document cited by ABC News.

Correll also said that, as part of the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense program, his command was “assessing strategic missile threats and prioritizing locations for defense against attacks by nuclear-armed adversaries.”

The admiral’s statement included an estimate of total Russian nuclear forces that counted 2,600 strategic warheads and up to 2,000 warheads for theater nuclear weapons.

This marks the first disclosure by Strategic Command of an internal estimate of the size of Russia’s nuclear force, according to Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, in a social media post.

April 2026

The U.S. intelligence community assesses that China does not plan to invade Taiwan in 2027 and has no “fixed timeline for achieving unification” with the self-governing island, according to the Director of National Intelligence’s Annual Threat Assessment report. “Chinese officials recognize that an amphibious invasion of Taiwan would be extremely challenging and carry a high risk of failure,” the March 18 report said.

The latest assessment of Chinese intentions contradicts a widespread interpretation of former CIA Director William Burns’s February 2023 statement that Chinese President Xi Jinping had instructed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.

Nonetheless, “Beijing views nuclear modernization as critical for strategic competition” with the United States and intends to continue diversifying and expanding its nuclear forces, the worldwide assessment said.

It also suggested “Chinese officials probably fear that the Golden Dome for America [missile defense program] will reduce Washington’s threshold for initiating military action against Beijing in a crisis” and this likely explains China’s interest in arms control initiatives in outer space.

The annual report also confirmed that Russia did not exceed the central limits of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) despite suspending implementation of the treaty in February 2023. This is consistent with the State Department’s January 2025 assessment, in its New START implementation report, that Russia “did not engage in any large-scale activity above the Treaty limits in 2024.”

The largest threat posed by Russian nuclear forces stem from “an escalatory spiral in an ongoing conflict such as Ukraine or a new conflict,” the worldwide threat assessment said.

Pakistan continues to develop missile technology that could provide it with longer-range systems to strike targets beyond South Asia, and “if these trends continue, [intercontinental ballistic missiles] that would threaten” the United States. (See ACT, January/February 2025.)

The report also expressed concerns about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, driven by regional insecurity, a deterioration of norms, doubts about security agreements, and declining fear of credible consequences.—XIAODON LIANG 

April 2026

The United States has used, for the first time in combat, a new short-range ballistic missile that would have violated the defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

Open-source imagery analysts identified a missile featured in a March 1 Pentagon social media post as the new Precision Strike Missile (PrSM).

Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed in a March 13 press conference that the missile had been employed in combat against Iranian targets.

It was originally designed with a range under 500 kilometers. Following the first Trump administration’s withdrawal from INF Treaty in August 2019, the missile was subsequently tested in October 2021 to a range beyond the original design target.

The INF Treaty banned the United States and Russia from possessing, producing, or flight-testing ground-launched missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. In July 2014, the United States accused Russia of violating the treaty by developing the 9M729 ground-launched cruise missile.

The PrSM system is a successor to the 300-kilometer range Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) and shares launch platforms with its predecessor.

In an Aug. 4 statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry noted that under the rules of the now-defunct INF Treaty, the use of these older platforms to launch the missile would have meant inclusion of those same platforms under the prohibitions of the treaty. (See ACT, September 2025).

The Army is developing anti-ship and extended-range variants of the missile. Army soldiers fired two of the missiles in an anti-ship mode during a June 2024 exercise in Palau, sinking a decommissioned Navy ship.—XIAODON LIANG

April 2026

In line with other moves to enhance European nuclear and conventional military planning, Finland announced its intention to lift its full ban on hosting nuclear weapons.

A March 5 press release from the Finnish Defense Ministry said the government intended to amend the state’s Nuclear Energy Act to allow nuclear arms within its territory. The act, passed in 1987, currently prohibits the “Import of nuclear explosives as well as their manufacture, possession and detonation.”

The proposed change would allow the import of nuclear devices into Finland or their transport, supply or possession. The amendment was open for comment by the Finnish Parliament until April 2.

“The objective is to remove legal barriers to enable Finland’s homeland defence as part of the Alliance and the full utilisation of NATO’s deterrence and defence,” the ministry emphasized in the press release.

On March 2, France announced a change in its nuclear strategy, calling for an increase in its nuclear arsenal and the potential for temporary deployment of nuclear air forces to other NATO allies. (See ACT, March 2026.)

In a March 4 interview with EBRA group, French Minister of the Armed Forces Catherine Vautrin said: “We have retained the fissile materials (uranium and plutonium) from nuclear warheads dismantled after the Cold War. As such, we have a stockpile entirely sufficient to produce the new nuclear warheads.”

The United States and France convened a dialogue on “deterrence, strategic stability, and nonproliferation” in Paris March 9. They decided to establish an annual bilateral dialogue and to create a working group to facilitate strengthened cooperation and prepare annual talks.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov condemned Finland’s change in policy and told reporters, March 6: “This is a statement that leads to an escalation of tensions on the European continent.”—LIBBY FLATOFF 

April 2026

A Russian intelligence service accused France and the United Kingdom Feb. 24 of considering the transfer of nuclear weapons to Ukraine, echoing earlier unfounded claims in October 2022 that Kyiv was seeking to attain a dirty bomb.

The new allegations were quickly rejected by French, UK, and Ukrainian officials.

“Ukraine has already denied such absurd Russian claims many times before, and we officially deny them again now,” said Heorhii Tykhyi, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, according to a Feb. 24 Reuters report.

Dismissing the “baseless statement,” the French Defense Ministry’s communications director, Olivia Penichou, said that France always honored its commitments under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which bars the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear-weapon states, Reuters reported Feb. 26.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova expanded Feb. 24 on the intelligence service accusation, claiming that “the plans involve, at minimum, a dirty bomb, though serious consideration is also being given to full-fledged nuclear weapons, including delivery systems.”

U.S. officials were concerned that the last round of Russian accusations in October 2022 were a potential pretext for nuclear escalation, The New York Times later reported. Unlike in 2022, however, the new accusations do not appear to be prompted by major setbacks to the Russian conventional war effort in Ukraine.

The new accusations have also not been taken up by senior Russian officials at the highest levels. In October 2022, the dirty bomb accusations were widely promulgated by cabinet-level ministers, ambassadors, and spokespersons for President Vladimir Putin.

Beyond Zakharova, the latest allegations have been repeated by Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of the Russian Security Council and former president. The intelligence report was also discussed by Russian parliamentarians.—XIAODON LIANG

April 2026

The U.S. Department of Defense designated AI company Anthropic a supply chain risk March 4, in a move the firm described as punishment in an ongoing contract dispute.

The designation will prevent the department and its contractors from using Anthropic products, including its AI model, Claude, and associated tools in their operations.

The company’s chief executive officer, Dario Amodei, said in a Feb. 26 statement that two outstanding issues had arisen in contract renegotiations with the Pentagon: the company’s insistence that its products not be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons systems.

The Pentagon insisted that its contract with Anthropic permits “any lawful use.”

Anthropic’s “true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a Feb. 27 social media post.

President Donald Trump said on the same day in a social media post that he had ordered the entire federal government to cease using Anthropic products within six months.

A judge in the Northern District of California granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction March 26 in a lawsuit that the firm had filed against the Defense Department. The lawsuit described the Pentagon’s designation as “unprecedented and unlawful.”

Competitor firm OpenAI announced late Feb. 27 that it had reached agreement with the Pentagon on terms of use for its products with the department.

Anthropic’s Claude overtook OpenAI’s ChatGPT in mobile app downloads for the first time following the Pentagon decision, according to mobile analytics firm Appfigures.—XIAODON LIANG