Biden would push for less US reliance on nukes for defense

And although the former vice president has not fully detailed his nuclear priorities, he says he would make the U.S. less reliant on the world’s deadliest weapons.The two candidates’ views on nuclear weapons policy and strategy carry unusual significance in this election because the United States is at a turning point in deciding the future of its weapons arsenal and because of growing debate about the threat posed by Chinese and Russian nuclear advances.China, whose relatively small nuclear force is growing in sophistication, is cited by the Pentagon’s top nuclear commander as a leading reason why the United States should go all out on nuclear modernization.“We are going into a very different world,” Adm. Charles Richard, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, said Sept. His administration has walked away from one arms control deal with Russia and balked at extending an Obama-era strategic nuclear treaty with Russia that Biden says he would keep in place.Just days before Trump entered the White House, then-Vice President Biden cautioned against abandoning Obama’s approach.“If future budgets reverse the choices we’ve made, and pour additional money into a nuclear buildup, it hearkens back to the Cold War and will do nothing to increase the day-to-day security of the United States or our allies,” Biden said in a Jan. 11, 2017, speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.James Acton, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment, says Biden’s instincts on nuclear weapons are more liberal than those of much of the Democratic Party’s defense establishment.