The Second Nuclear Age Arrives: How Bracken’s Framework Explains America’s New Strategic Reality
The recent Wall Street Journal article on the emerging nuclear arms race between the United States, Russia, and China provides concrete evidence for what Yale strategist Paul Bracken has long warned about: we have entered what he calls the “Second Nuclear Age.” This new era fundamentally differs from the Cold War’s bipolar nuclear competition, creating unprecedented challenges that American policymakers have been slow to recognize and slower still to address.
Bracken’s Second Nuclear Age framework, developed over years of analysis and detailed in his seminal work and numerous Defense.info interviews, argues that the post-Cold War assumption that nuclear weapons would fade in strategic importance was dangerously wrong. As he noted in a September 2024 Defense.info discussion, “nuclear weapons in a bi-polar world are part of a very different system of managing the nuclear threat than is the case in a multi-polar authoritarian world.”
The WSJ article validates this assessment with stark data: China is projected to reach rough parity with the United States in deployed nuclear warheads by the mid-2030s, while Russia continues developing exotic new systems like the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile and Poseidon underwater drone. North Korea, now formally allied with Russia, possesses an estimated 50 warheads and is rapidly developing intercontinental capabilities. This is precisely the multipolar nuclear environment Bracken warned would emerge.
What makes this situation particularly challenging, as both Bracken and the WSJ article emphasize, is that the United States must now prepare for simultaneous nuclear peer competitors without the clear industrial and economic edge it possessed during the Cold War. Matthew Kroenig’s observation in the WSJ that “we’re entering the third nuclear age that is going to look a lot more like Cold War than the 1990s and the 2000s” echoes Bracken’s framework while acknowledging the crucial difference: this time America faces multiple nuclear rivals simultaneously.
One of Bracken’s most important contributions to strategic thinking is his insistence that nuclear weapons cannot be treated as separate from conventional military operations. As he noted in a Defense.info article in April 2020, “Nuclear war as a subject has been put into a small, separate box from conventional war. It is treated as a problem of two missile farms attacking each other. This perspective overlooks most of the important nuclear issues of our day.”
The WSJ article’s discussion of the “simultaneity problem” – where Chinese operations against Taiwan could trigger Russian military action against NATO members and possibly North Korean invasion of South Korea – illustrates exactly what Bracken has warned about. The Pentagon’s assumption that conventional and nuclear operations can be planned separately is dangerous fantasy. As Bracken emphasized, “You don’t have to fire a nuclear weapon to use it. The existence of nuclear weapons, by itself, profoundly shapes conventional options.”
This insight is particularly relevant to the Chinese nuclear buildup described in the WSJ article. Chinese strategists openly state their reasoning: they need sufficient nuclear capability to deter any U.S. consideration of nuclear use in a Taiwan conflict, allowing China to prevail conventionally. Retired Senior Col. Zhou Bo’s statement that China should increase its arsenal “to the extent that the U.S. will never even dare to think about using nuclear weapons against China” reflects exactly the kind of nuclear-conventional integration Bracken describes.
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the Second Nuclear Age is what Bracken calls the crisis management problem in a multipolar nuclear world. During the Cold War, despite multiple close calls, the United States and Soviet Union developed crisis management mechanisms, back channels, and a shared understanding of escalation dynamics. These evolved over decades of interaction.
Today, as Bracken noted in his September 2024 Defense.info interview, “we face a whole new ball game without the rules book of how to play the game being clearly established.” The WSJ article’s description of the growing bond between Moscow and Beijing – former rivals who nearly exchanged nuclear fire in 1969 – illustrates this uncertainty. When Xi Jinping showcased China’s nuclear triad at the September 2025 parade with Putin and Kim Jong Un as honored guests, it symbolized an unprecedented alignment of nuclear powers against American interests.
The Ukraine war demonstrates the crisis management challenges Bracken has highlighted. Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling successfully throttled American support for Ukraine, deploying nuclear weapons to Belarus and testing new systems specifically claimed to be impervious to American defenses. As Bracken observed regarding the war, “Russian territory will operate as a sanctuary which the West has little interest in comprehensively attacking for fear of triggering WMD use.”
The WSJ article quotes Vipin Narang warning that “if there is a regional conflict in Europe and China decides to take Taiwan, or vice versa, we will be stretched really thin. These are the kinds of scenarios we are really unprepared for.” This echoes Bracken’s repeated warnings about the challenges of managing multiple nuclear crises simultaneously.
Both Bracken and the WSJ article highlight how technological developments are outpacing strategic thinking. Bracken has particularly emphasized the dangerous intersection between reconnaissance-strike capabilities and nuclear systems. As he wrote in The Hill and discussed on Defense.info, “Advanced technology is spilling over into the nuclear arena. The most systemically important targets for China are other people’s nuclear weapons—the United States, obviously, but also India, Russia, North Korea and Pakistan.”
The WSJ article’s discussion of supercritical testing by Russia and China, and Trump’s consideration of resuming nuclear testing, reflects the technological dimension Bracken has long emphasized. While Russia develops exotic systems like Burevestnik and Poseidon, expert Fabian Hoffmann suggests these have “more psychological rather than military utility.” The Chinese, as the WSJ notes, take “a much smarter approach: They’re just building warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
This aligns with Bracken’s observation that China strategically built its advanced conventional forces first, with the nuclear buildup coming “as sort of a burst to minimize the U.S. reaction time with programs like Columbia submarines, Sentinel, and B-21.” The Chinese approach reflects sophisticated strategic thinking about how to achieve nuclear parity while minimizing American reaction time.
One of Bracken’s most sobering assessments concerns the viability of American extended deterrence commitments to allies. As he told Defense.info regarding the Chinese nuclear buildup, “I think there are enormous strategic and geopolitical implications of this force, notably the end of any credible policy of extended deterrence provided by the United States to allies.”
The WSJ article notes that the Moscow-Beijing alignment has “created an unprecedented level of strategic uncertainty for the U.S. and its European and Asian allies. That wariness is compounded by doubts among Washington’s allies about President Trump’s commitment to honor mutual-defense obligations.”
Bracken has argued that in a multipolar nuclear world, alliance commitments become increasingly difficult to maintain credibly. As he noted discussing NATO, “It does not require that the U.S. go to war to defend Montenegro or France or Britain. It only says that an attack on one is an attack on all. I really wonder if the NATO alliance would hold together if the threat of going nuclear was imminent.”
This challenge is particularly acute in the Pacific, where China’s nuclear buildup directly threatens the credibility of American security guarantees to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and other allies. The WSJ article’s description of Chinese confidence that they could defeat the United States in a conventional conflict due to “strong industrial capacity” reflects a belief that American extended deterrence is increasingly hollow.
Both Bracken’s analysis and the WSJ article document systematic American failure to adapt to Second Nuclear Age realities. As Narang told the WSJ, “Our entire nuclear modernization program was sized around the belief that we’re going to continue to have further cuts with Russia, and that China and North Korea wouldn’t pose challenges for the U.S. posture. All those assumptions have turned out to be wrong.”
Bracken has repeatedly emphasized this problem. As he noted, “DoD years ago, put nuclear weapons in a special box which is not connected directly to actual warfighting which is only conventional. We do not want to think about them except in unimaginable circumstances.” This intellectual compartmentalization, combined with two decades focused on counterterrorism and land wars, has left America unprepared for multipolar nuclear competition.
The 2023 bipartisan congressional commission recommendation to expand America’s nuclear arsenal for the first time in decades – mentioned in the WSJ article – represents belated recognition of what Bracken has long argued. But as he emphasized, simply building more weapons without rethinking strategy for the Second Nuclear Age is insufficient. The challenge is not just quantitative but qualitative: understanding how nuclear weapons shape strategy in a multipolar world requires fundamentally different thinking than Cold War bipolarity.
Bracken’s Second Nuclear Age framework suggests several imperatives for American strategy that align with concerns raised in the WSJ article.
First, the United States must acknowledge that nuclear weapons are integral to any serious conflict with peer competitors, not a separate consideration. As Bracken emphasized regarding Pacific strategy, nuclear weapons are “woven into the entire fabric of a Pacific strategy.”
Second, America needs to rebuild crisis management capabilities for a multipolar nuclear world. This includes developing mechanisms for managing simultaneous crises across multiple theaters and understanding how different nuclear powers think about escalation. The WSJ article’s description of the simultaneity problem – where conflict in one theater could trigger nuclear escalation in another – makes this imperative urgent.
Third, the United States must address the industrial and technological dimensions of nuclear competition. The WSJ article notes that China’s confidence stems partly from its “strong industrial capacity,” while America has lost its “clear industrial and economic edge.” Bracken has emphasized that in a multipolar nuclear world, overall economic and technological competitiveness becomes crucial to maintaining strategic position.
Finally, American strategy must address the challenge of maintaining credible extended deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age. This may require, as Bracken has suggested, developing new models of security partnerships that don’t rely solely on American nuclear guarantees. The WSJ article’s discussion of doubts about American commitment to mutual defense obligations reflects an urgent need for strategic reassessment.
The Wall Street Journal article documents with current data what Paul Bracken has been warning about for years: the Second Nuclear Age has arrived, and America is dangerously unprepared. The multipolar nuclear competition between the United States, Russia, China, and potentially other powers creates challenges fundamentally different from Cold War bipolarity.
Bracken’s framework helps explain why current developments are so concerning. The integration of nuclear and conventional operations, the crisis management challenges of simultaneity across multiple theaters, the technological spillover into nuclear domains, and the erosion of extended deterrence all create a strategic environment more complex and potentially more dangerous than the Cold War.
As Bracken noted, “multipolarity is the normal state of global affairs, not bipolarity.” The Second Nuclear Age represents a return to this historical norm, but with nuclear weapons woven throughout the fabric of great power competition.
America’s ability to navigate this new reality will determine not just its own security but the prospects for avoiding nuclear catastrophe in the 21st century.
The sobering evidence presented in the WSJ article suggests that this adaptation is urgent and that the intellectual framework Bracken has developed is essential for understanding the strategic landscape ahead.