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Among some nuclear strategists, military officers, and lawmakers, a belief bordering on the canonical has taken root that the United States is on the short end of a “deterrence gap” with Russia and China. Both countries, and especially Russia, possess theater-range nuclear weapons, whose comparatively small yield is thought to lower the threshold for their use. The relative dearth of these capabilities on the American side, so the thinking goes, denies Washington the ability to answer a limited regional nuclear strike with a comparable response and thus deter such an attack in the first place. Adversaries may therefore see an advantage in escalating a conventional conflict by crossing the nuclear Rubicon. Hence, the elevation of an asymmetry in weapon types equates to something far more consequential: a veritable “gap” in deterrence.

Handwringing about such gaps has a long and tortured pedigree. In the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy famously bludgeoned the Eisenhower administration over the existence of a “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union, now understood to have been a bald fiction. In the 1970s, groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger and the “Team B” intelligence panel peddled the myth that, as a result of increasing Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile accuracy, the United States faced a “window of vulnerability” to a first strike that could only be remedied by a massive nuclear build-up.

The eternal hunt for “deterrence gaps,” like the search for evidence of UFOs and Bigfoot, has spawned a cottage industry to supply them. Defense analysts and think tanks scour the strategic landscape in search of chinks in the armor of deterrence, which, once christened as proper “gaps,” motivate conceptual studies, congressional requirements, and ultimately new weapons programs to close them. Much of this process is visible to hostile observers.

In a practice that is unique among the nuclear powers, many American officials are strangely unabashed in voicing their anxieties about the nation’s weak spots in potential nuclear crises. These officials often ignore or dismiss Russian and Chinese perceptions of their own shortcomings and vulnerabilities with respect to deterrence and the conventional military balance of power. For instance, both Russia and China point to superior U.S. ballistic missile defenses as altering the strategic equilibrium, which in turn drives their modernization and expansion programs. Further, Russian strategic missile reliability concerns are public knowledge, and their theater-level systems significantly underperformed in the Ukraine conflict.

Confessionals of U.S. apprehension, beyond drawing attention to the very infirmities they are meant to redress, may nourish adversary beliefs about U.S. decision-making that are both incorrect and deeply damaging to America’s bargaining position in a crisis. Having recently departed after some 30 years with the U.S. Department of Energy, holding senior roles in both the department’s intelligence office and in the National Nuclear Security Administration, I can speak with some knowledge about both American and foreign perceptions of the U.S. nuclear posture and the perils of indiscreet rhetoric that is becoming all too common.

In a provocative 2022 letter to Congress that soon became public, Adm. Charles Richard, then commander of U.S. Strategic Command, confided that the conflict in Ukraine and China’s nuclear trajectory had convinced him that “a deterrence and assurance gap exists” between the United States and its nuclear adversaries. His preferred tonic — a low U.S.-yield, non-ballistic nuclear system — implied the nature of the imagined gap. In retirement, Richard has been even more explicit. In a 2025 essay co-authored with Franklin Miller and Robert Peters, he argued that America’s “lack of proportional non-strategic, non-ballistic, theater range systems … could cause autocrats in Beijing, Moscow, or even Pyongyang to conclude they cannot only [sic] threaten to use their [tactical nuclear weapons] for coercive purposes” but can employ such systems “to achieve operational advantage and ultimately victory in a conflict.”

Helpfully guided by their spotlight, the authors assert that “adversaries almost certainly now see a gap in America’s post-Cold War deterrent posture,” which naturally must be treated by a prescription they are equally happy to dispense. This is something more than the timeworn Beltway practice of confecting a “self-licking ice cream cone,” in which an entity contrives a problem and then proposes a solution that only it can provide. (A humorous Duffel Blog headline captures the phenomenon: “US ‘far behind in capabilities’ being sold by retired general.”)

Although some figures clamoring for new nuclear weapons have institutional incentives to do so, the chief hazard of indulging their wish lists is not the waste of taxpayer dollars. Indeed, the systems being considered may have significant operational utility. Rather, it is the danger of giving credence to the notion that a rigid rulebook governs U.S. nuclear decision-making and that an adversary who finds loopholes in it can run roughshod over the United States.

Advocates depict low-yield theater weapons as the solution to an operational constraint, but it is in fact a normative one. Even now, the United States has many options to respond to a non-strategic nuclear attack, from conventional forces to nuclear weapons with a variety of yields. But orthodoxy decrees that to deter low-yield nuclear use, only certain kinds of nuclear munitions will do. They must be immediately available in theater, the reasoning goes, and proportional to an enemy’s strike. The principle of proportionality, in particular, has been enthroned in U.S. nuclear doctrine, with implications not only for weapon acquisitions but also foreign assessments of American decision-making.

In 2020, through a combination of serendipity and agile decision-making, the National Nuclear Security Administration built and the U.S. Navy began fielding W76-2 low-yield warheads on its ballistic missile submarines, a move intended to disabuse adversaries of the idea that “employment of low-yield nuclear weapons will give them an advantage over the United States.” The W76-2 was an outgrowth of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, which asserted, “Expanding flexible U.S. nuclear options now, to include low-yield options, is important for the preservation of credible deterrence against regional aggression.” Such thinking also birthed the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile now planned under the U.S. nuclear modernization program of record. In 2023, the Strategic Posture Commission recommended yet more options to deter limited nuclear use, emphasizing theater systems positioned in the Asia-Pacific region.

The hazard of linking the credibility of a deterrent so explicitly to as-yet unacquired weapons is obvious. The Navy does not plan to field this sea-launched cruise missile until 2034, while many analysts have suggested a much earlier timetable for China’s attempted conquest of Taiwan. Has the United States given Beijing a neon-lit advertisement of its window of opportunity? And if, for whatever reason, these systems never materialize, the nation will have put itself in an awkward position.

During the Cold War, political scientist Robert Jervis noted a peculiar American propensity to “stress, and often exaggerate” the nation’s own weakness in advocating for a particular strategic system. Weapons programs were invariably couched as necessary to “catch up with the Soviets and remedy pressing military deficits,” forever portraying the United States in a position of strategic disadvantage. The danger of this tactic, Jervis observed, was that “the state will fail the test it has set for itself. Having declared that its security will suffer unless a self-defined problem is remedied, it must then cope with it or appear militarily weak and politically irresolute.”

An instance of rhetorical self-sabotage occurred in the late 2000s during the debate over the Reliable Replacement Warhead. A brainchild of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, the warhead was marketed as a new and dependable design that would ensure the long-term reliability of the nuclear stockpile without the need for underground testing. Proponents painted a foreboding picture if Congress failed to fund the program. In 2007, the secretaries of State, Defense, and Energy penned a dramatic joint appeal, cataloging the “technical risks associated with an aging stockpile of Cold War-era nuclear weapons.” Continuing to extend the lives of these warheads was dangerous, they warned, because the process “risks incorporating or accruing technical changes that could, over time, inadvertently undermine their reliability and performance.” Without the Reliable Replacement Warhead, they expressed concern over nothing less than “the long-term ability of the United States to sustain its strategy of deterrence” and to “meet its security commitment to allies.”

The very next year, Congress declined to fund the program, and the White House later directed that work on the concept cease. The national laboratories stoically resumed their warhead life extensions, which continue to this day, and many of the officials who had intoned so gravely about the risks of aging weapons smoothly pivoted to affirming their unstinting reliability. Whether our adversaries drew unflattering conclusions about the stockpile’s reliability — or the judgment of American officials — is anyone’s guess. But the episode provides a lesson in the pitfalls of irresponsible rhetoric in the service of programmatic or parochial objectives.

The current anxiety about U.S. low-yield nuclear weapons is even more harmful. Because this angst springs from the self-imposed requirements of proportionality and immediacy in nuclear retaliation, fretting about American limitations implies the president’s decision space in a crisis would be tightly restricted. Such a vein of argument differs sharply from the many useful instances of highlighting military vulnerabilities as a means of addressing them. Airpower pioneer Billy Mitchell, for example, engineered a provocative bombing demonstration in 1921 to prove that capital ships could be destroyed by aircraft, a belief deeply inimical to Navy interests at the time. In a series of tests off the Atlantic coast, U.S. aircraft sank several captured German vessels with aerial bombs, forcing the Navy to reexamine naval aviation. But the exercise merely demonstrated the novel application of an existing weapon. It offered no insight whatsoever into how American leaders might think or act in a conflict.

The assumption that any U.S. president, and especially our current one, will slavishly adhere to the precept of proportionality in nuclear warfighting lacks a firm historical basis. As scholar James Acton reminds us, “During the Cold War, the United States essentially rejected the idea that the Law of Armed Conflict should be applied to nuclear weapons.” Indeed, the first time the U.S. government explicitly affirmed that its nuclear war plans were “consistent with the fundamental principles of the Law of Armed Conflict” — including proportionality — was in 2013. Although the first Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review pledged that any U.S. “initiation and conduct of nuclear operations would adhere to the law of armed conflict,” adversaries would have to reflect carefully on whether this years-old commitment serves as an infallible guide to White House decision-making today.

On what basis, after all, should adversaries assume the United States must and will obey the law of armed conflict in a nuclear row? Certainly, Moscow and Beijing will not. Little need be said of Russia’s slaughter of civilians in Syria and Ukraine, which has been as deliberate as it has been wanton. China, meanwhile, has introduced a wide range of cyber weapons that sit latent on our civil telecommunications and energy sectors. Further, the configuration of China’s nuclear force allows grim deductions about its intended targets, which is to say, Beijing would have no qualms about incinerating civilian population centers in a nuclear war. These observations should not be understood as a call for the United States to adopt similarly barbarous policies. But neither should Russia and China assume that American chivalry is a given around which their military operations can be planned — or that the current occupant of the Oval Office will feel bound by the strictures of nuclear common law.

More than a few major crises have been set in motion by world leaders’ misjudgments of their counterparts’ backbone. Historians widely attribute Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s belief that he could get away with placing nuclear missiles in Cuba to his personal appraisal of President Kennedy, whom the Russian leader judged to be feckless and weak. Having botched the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and come across as “very inexperienced, even immature” during the Vienna summit six weeks later, Kennedy had not impressed the Kremlin. His unexpected tenacity during the Cuban Missile Crisis may have repaired American credibility vis-à-vis the Soviet Union but did so by bringing the world closer to nuclear war than in any incident before or since.

At least Kennedy’s earlier failure to project resolve was his own, and he was not undercut by the national security intelligentsia. Today, elements of the defense establishment are advocating, often very publicly, for new weapons on the basis of what they judge the president could or could not do in various conflict scenarios. Much of their analysis features a certitude that starkly departs from the calculated ambiguity that often surrounds nuclear policy.

One need not subscribe to the “madman theory” of deterrence to appreciate the usefulness of a dash of unpredictability in disorienting one’s adversaries. Richard Nixon first coined the term to capture his idiosyncratic approach to pressuring Hanoi to end the Vietnam War — by convincing Ho Chi Minh that he was just a little bit crazy and “had his hand on the nuclear button.” Nuclear signaling that is so provocative and ripe for miscalculation is probably unwise. But U.S. doctrine should not be so prescriptive as to present adversaries with a virtual how-to manual for prevailing in nuclear confrontations.

Beyond sensitivity to the law of armed conflict, adherence to the principle of proportionality is rooted in the belief that threats of disproportionate retaliation simply lack credibility. An American threat to obliterate Shanghai in response to China’s use of a tactical nuclear weapon against a U.S. carrier group is thought to be unbelievable and thus ineffective as a deterrent. But is it?

Leaders in Moscow and Beijing must ask themselves whether a president who famously threatened an enemy with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” will observe all the niceties of etiquette following their use of a “tactical” nuclear weapon against U.S. interests. More recently, an empowered and unconventional commander-in-chief directed U.S. military operations against Venezuela and Iran, in contravention of international norms and without consultations with allies or Congress, suggesting an audacious decision-making process that is insensitive to tradition. Should America’s adversaries stumble into a catastrophic misjudgment of the president’s resolve, one hopes the blunder will not result from their uncritical reading of American strategists thinking no further than their own institutional interests. And for clarity of strategic messaging, perhaps U.S. strategists should publicly talk a little less and focus a little more on the current program of record rather than inventing new “gaps” in deterrence.

Jay Tilden is the managing director for national security at Mission Strategies, a government affairs firm based in Washington, D.C. Previously, he was a member of the Senior Executive Service within the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration. 

Image: ChatGPT