Non-Nuclear Weapons for First Strike Missions: Assessment of Current Conventional Weapons for Strategic Counterforce and Mutual Reassurance

Image: Tech. Sgt. Brigette Waltermire / U.S. Air National Guard

This report examines how currently deployed conventional strike systems affect US–China–Russia strategic stability. Current debates on strategic competition focus overwhelmingly on AI, cyber, hypersonic, and space systems, while neglecting the increasingly blurred conventional–nuclear nexus. Today’s long-range conventional weapons possess the range, precision, and lethality to threaten the nuclear forces of major powers. Major powers increasingly possess entangled nuclear and non-nuclear capabilities with strategic effects, thereby undermining the foundations of strategic stability. Accordingly, to uphold some kind of strategic stability, practical and feasible steps must be taken to reduce miscalculation and inadvertent escalation. The strategic conventional counterforce problem is absent from Western debates but important in China and Russia. This problem is vital in any attempt to restore strategic arms control and disarmament processes. Nuclear only diplomacy cannot work when the systems are entangled; this report aims to open this debate.