Washington: A regional conflict in which nuclear weapons are used locally and trigger a wider escalation poses a greater danger than a surprise mass attack on the United States, a senior Pentagon official has warned.
Elbridge Colby, Under Secretary of War for Policy, said the consequences of a large-scale nuclear strike on the United States would deter countries capable of launching one.
“What I would fear more is a regional war,” Colby told the 2026 United States Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium.
He described the danger as “a kind of local war, conventional war that might have local employment, God forbid, of nuclear weapons that could escalate from there as it expanded outward.”
Colby said decision-making time in such a crisis could be extremely limited. One side could misread a military move as preparation for a total attack and respond on a far greater scale than expected.
“That would lead very rapidly to an incredibly pressurised situation that would be almost by definition not in our interests,” he said.
The United States, he said, must give the president credible and rational options. Those choices should deter an adversary without creating an uncontrollable spiral towards nuclear war.
“It’s not taking away options for the president. It’s adding credible options,” Colby said.
He called the modernisation of America’s nuclear deterrent “the single most important initiative for the American military”. Washington, he said, requires a survivable and diversified nuclear triad, secure second-strike forces and a deterrence strategy integrated with conventional forces.
Colby said the administration was not conducting another nuclear posture review. Instead, it was reviewing nuclear employment guidance and focusing on carrying out modernisation plans.
“This is so important, we know where we’re going…now it’s about execution,” he said.
China’s growing nuclear capability has created an unprecedented strategic problem, Colby said. Unlike during the Cold War, the United States now faces two potential nuclear peers — China and Russia.
“I remain cautiously optimistic about the ability for us to maintain effective deterrence in the context of three sort of great power nuclear states,” he said. “I’m not sanguine about that.”
“If you can try to mitigate these pressures through engagement, through respectful dialogue, that’s totally consistent with being strong,” he said.
The United States maintains a nuclear triad consisting of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and strategic bombers.
