...Timed with Gen. Breedlove’s testimony, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments will release a new paper Tuesday that calls for the U.S. to develop new nuclear deterrence strategies. Andrew Krepinevich, the president of the think tank and a prominent military strategist, said that the world has entered a second nuclear age, one far more complex than the Cold War stand off between Russia and the U.S.
The U.S. nuclear policy has been for many years that the nuclear arsenal is maintained to deter anyone else from using a nuclear weapon. But threats grow around the world, and as a growing number of countries, like North Korea, have nuclear capability, the U.S. has to take a hard look at the situations where another country might use nuclear weapons, Mr. Krepinevich said.
“If we are trying to reassure them and trying to deter them we have to understand what their strategic doctrines are,” Mr. Krepinevich said. “We can’t assume the only use of nuclear weapons is to deter someone else from using nuclear weapons.”
According to the CSBA paper, Chinese strategists have suggested a nuclear-like weapon that generated an electromagnetic pulse could be used in electronic warfare, without crossing the nuclear threshold. Russian military experts have sometimes advocated strategies that involve escalating a situation to deescalate, an approach that could lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, the paper said...