Normalizing the Unthinkable: The Pentagon’s Quiet Push to Make Nuclear War Easier to Start
A classified review inside the Department of Defense would give the president more “usable” nuclear options in a regional war with China or Russia. Sold as modernization, it is something else entirely — a doctrine designed to lower the threshold for nuclear use, drafted for the one president in American history a chorus of physicians and lawmakers has already called unfit to hold the codes.
The most consequential nuclear policy shift in a generation is not being debated on the Senate floor. It is being drafted behind classified doors by Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, and it will land on the desk of a president whose fitness to make life-and-death decisions is now the subject of formal legislation. On August 5, NBC News reported that Colby is preparing a new U.S. nuclear strategy that would place far greater emphasis on shorter-range “tactical” nuclear weapons in a potential regional war with China or Russia. Five sources familiar with the plans described a review whose central purpose is to expand the range of nuclear options presented to the president in a crisis — options, as one senior defense official told NBC, that are meant to be more “credible,” meaning more usable.
Read that sentence again. The stated goal of the review is not to make nuclear war less likely. It is to make American nuclear use more believable to our adversaries — which, translated out of Pentagon prose, means more believable to ourselves. A weapon that leadership can imagine using is a weapon leadership is more likely to use. That is not deterrence theory; it is the logic of the entire proposal, and it is being sold to the public as routine modernization.
It is not routine. It is the culmination of a series of choices, made by this president and this administration, that have systematically dismantled the guardrails around nuclear use while quietly building new ramps toward it. Six months ago, Donald Trump allowed the last binding U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control treaty to lapse rather than accept Vladimir Putin’s offer to extend its limits. Today, the Pentagon is drafting the doctrine that will fill the void. The two events are not unrelated. They are the same policy, expressed twice.
I. What Colby Is Actually Building
The classified review is being led by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s number-three official, who was confirmed to the post in 2025 with the personal intervention of Vice President JD Vance. Colby is best known as the principal author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy that reoriented American military planning toward “great power competition” with China. He is a serious strategist. He is also the official who spearheaded the pause in U.S. military aid to Ukraine and the review of American troop levels in Europe — decisions that have already reshaped the security architecture of two continents.
According to NBC’s reporting, Colby’s argument is that America’s existing nuclear posture — built around long-range strategic weapons designed to obliterate an adversary’s entire nuclear force — no longer credibly deters regional aggression. If Russia used a low-yield warhead against a NATO ally, or China used one against Taiwan or Japan, the current U.S. arsenal offers a president two choices: do nothing, or annihilate a continent. Colby’s proposal, in essence, would build the middle option — a suite of shorter-range, lower-yield “battlefield” weapons that a president could theoretically deploy in a regional conflict without immediately triggering strategic exchange.
Two senior defense officials confirmed the broad outlines of the review to Breaking Defense on August 7, framing it as a project to expand White House “options.” Colby was scheduled to brief his ideas at U.S. Strategic Command headquarters in Nebraska on the same day NBC broke the story.
Elbridge Colby
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Confirmed in 2025 after a contested Senate vote and personal lobbying by Vice President JD Vance. Previously halted Ukraine aid, reviewed European posture. Confirmation details.
“Credible” tactical options
The classified review would emphasize shorter-range, lower-yield warheads for regional war, breaking from decades of reliance on strategic missiles. NBC News investigation.
New START, expired
On February 5, 2026, the last binding U.S.-Russia strategic arms treaty lapsed after Trump refused to extend it. No successor exists. Arms Control Association report.
One man decides
Under existing law, the president alone can order a nuclear launch. No Cabinet vote. No congressional check. No consultation required. Sole authority explained.
II. The Treaty They Let Die
To understand why this Pentagon review is not modernization but rather escalation dressed as it, you have to understand what happened on February 5, 2026 — and what did not happen in the months leading up to it.
The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, signed by Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev in 2010 and extended by Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin in 2021, capped each country’s deployed strategic warheads at 1,550 and its strategic launchers at 700. It included robust verification and monitoring provisions. It was, for fifteen years, the single most important brake on strategic nuclear expansion between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.
In September 2025, Putin offered a lifeline. Speaking to his Security Council, he proposed that both sides continue to observe New START’s central numerical limits for one year past the treaty’s expiration, giving negotiators time to work out a successor agreement. Trump’s initial response, delivered offhandedly to a reporter, was that Putin’s proposal “sounds like a good idea to me.” A serious administration would have taken yes for an answer.
Instead, the administration did nothing. As detailed in a February 2026 letter to Trump organized by Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and signed by a bipartisan group of arms-control-minded lawmakers, the United States failed to make any formal response to the Russian offer. Then, in January, Trump told reporters of the treaty: “If it expires, it expires.” It did. On February 5, 2026, for the first time since the 1970s, the United States and Russia entered a period with no legally binding limits on their strategic nuclear arsenals. Trump promised on social media that a “new, improved, and modernized Treaty” would be negotiated. Six months later, none exists.
What does exist is Colby’s review. This is the sequence: dismantle the ceiling, then build the ramp. First eliminate the framework that constrains nuclear arsenals, then draft the doctrine that expands the scenarios in which nuclear weapons might be used. Each step, presented in isolation, is defensible in Pentagon jargon. Presented together — as they must be, because they are one policy — they describe an administration walking, deliberately, toward a lower threshold for the use of the most destructive weapons ever created.
III. The Language of Normalization
The word doing the most work in this entire proposal is “tactical.” It is the word that makes the strategy sellable in polite policy company. It is also, at a fundamental level, a lie.
There is no internationally agreed definition of what makes a nuclear weapon “tactical” as opposed to “strategic.” The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, writing on the day New START expired, noted that the treaty itself defined strategic weapons as those “intercontinental in range” — meaning the “tactical” label is really just about how far a warhead can travel, not how much destruction it produces. A “low-yield” tactical warhead, in modern usage, can still exceed the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb. Once one detonates in a regional war, no scientist, no general, and no diplomat can tell you with any confidence that the other side will experience it as anything other than a nuclear strike.
This is not a fringe view. It was, in fact, the view of the previous administration. In October 2022, President Biden stated flatly: “I don’t think there’s any such thing as an ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.” The Arms Control Association, one of the most respected voices in the field, has consistently warned that “policies that threaten the first use of nuclear weapons, whether they are long-range or shorter-range, tactical nuclear weapons carry unacceptable risks.”
“The premise that we need “more credible” nuclear options so adversaries believe we would actually use them is not deterrence. It is preparation. Lowering the bar to use nuclear weapons does not deter war. It makes nuclear war more thinkable.”
— The 2547NOW Editorial Board
The second euphemism is “credible.” A senior Pentagon official, defending the review to NBC, said: “Our view is that we need credible nuclear options.” The word functions as a hinge. Credible to whom? Credible in what scenario? The unspoken answer is that “credible” means the president must plausibly be willing to use these weapons — because a deterrent no adversary believes in is no deterrent at all. And the only way to make the threat credible is to build weapons and doctrines that make actual use imaginable. That is the entire point of the review. To read Colby’s logic is to watch an argument tighten around itself: we need credible options so we can deter; to be credible, we must be willing to use them; to be willing to use them, we must design weapons that make use imaginable.
What starts as deterrence ends as normalization. That is not a distortion of the policy. That is the policy.
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IV. The Escalation Trap
The most sober critics of this review are not peace activists. They are strategic thinkers who have spent their entire careers studying nuclear escalation, and they are alarmed. The Defense Post, reporting on the review on August 7, noted that critics in Congress and among foreign policy experts warn that “placing greater emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons lowers the threshold for nuclear conflict and risks sparking a regional arms race in Europe and East Asia.”
Their argument is grounded in decades of Cold War scholarship and a very simple observation: there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war. Once the nuclear threshold is crossed in a regional conflict, the pressures for further escalation are immense. Every actor in the chain — the president who authorized the first strike, the adversary now on the receiving end, the militaries watching from Beijing and Moscow and Washington — is forced to make decisions about response in minutes, with incomplete information, under conditions of maximum stress. The historical and simulation record is unambiguous: tactical use escalates. It does not stay tactical.
Consider the specific scenario Colby’s review appears designed for. Russia uses a low-yield warhead against a NATO ally in the Baltics. The United States responds with a “tactical” strike against Russian forces. Russia, now under nuclear attack on its own perceived doorstep, faces a choice: absorb the strike and appear weak, or escalate. Every escalation dominance study since the 1960s suggests the latter. The Breitbart analysis of Colby’s proposal — a source not exactly known for progressive framing — acknowledged that a frustrated Putin, faced with tactical strikes on Russian forces, “might conclude that wrecking Ukraine with tactical nuclear warheads is worth the risk of America hitting Russia with a few small bombs in return.” Even the doctrine’s sympathizers understand that the “small bombs” don’t stay small.
What Colby’s proposal describes as a middle option is, in practice, a fuse. Once lit, no one has ever demonstrated the ability to extinguish it.
V. What Leadership Would Look Like
The most damning critique of this Pentagon review is not that it is dangerous — though it is — but that it represents the diametric opposite of what genuine national security leadership demands in this moment.
A president interested in reducing the risk of nuclear war would have accepted Putin’s September 2025 offer to extend New START’s central limits for a year. A president interested in reducing the risk of nuclear war would be using the diplomatic bandwidth of the American presidency to bring China into strategic arms talks, as Brookings scholars have repeatedly urged, rather than using it to attack the pope, threaten to destroy civilizations, and post AI-generated images of himself as Jesus. A president interested in reducing the risk of nuclear war would be ordering a review of how to raise the threshold for nuclear use — through no-first-use pledges, through the elimination of the sole-authority doctrine, through the drawdown of tactical stockpiles.
These are not utopian demands. They are, in fact, the core of ongoing legislation. Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Representative Ted Lieu of California have reintroduced their Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act in every Congress since 2017, most recently just days after Trump’s second inauguration. Their bill would prohibit any president from launching a nuclear first strike without a congressional declaration of war. It is co-sponsored by lawmakers who have watched, up close, what it means to have a president with unilateral launch authority and questionable judgment.
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, writing with former Secretary of Defense William Perry in a USA Today op-ed after the January 6 attack, put the case plainly: no single person should have the godlike power to order the end of civilization. Perry, who served as Bill Clinton’s defense secretary and who spent his career inside the nuclear command chain, added that it is “long past time” to end the policy of sole authority.
None of this is happening. Instead, we are getting the inverse. We are getting a president who let arms control lapse, a policy chief drafting doctrines to expand nuclear options, and an unbroken chain of command that puts the launch decision in the hands of one man — a man 36 physicians have described, in a statement now in the Congressional Record, as suffering a “rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline.”
The 25th Amendment, Nuclear Command, and a Presidency at the Edge
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 in the shadow of Kennedy’s assassination and the memory of Woodrow Wilson’s stroke, provides the mechanism the framers of the modern presidency intended for exactly this moment. It permits the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet — or, alternatively, “such other body as Congress may by law provide” — to declare that a sitting president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” and to transfer those powers to the vice president as acting president. It is the constitutional emergency brake.
The calls to pull that brake are no longer coming from the fringe. On April 14, 2026, House Judiciary Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) introduced legislation to establish an independent Commission on Presidential Capacity — the “such other body” the amendment explicitly contemplates — with fifty House Democrats as cosponsors. On April 7, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) directly called on Vice President JD Vance and the Cabinet to invoke Section 4 after Trump publicly threatened that “a whole civilization will die.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for his removal in the same period. In July, after Trump’s prime-time address alleging foreign election tampering, California Governor Gavin Newsom described the moment simply: “This is a 25th Amendment moment.”
On April 30, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed of Rhode Island entered into the Congressional Record a statement signed by 36 physicians from Harvard, Tufts, Columbia, and George Washington University warning of Trump’s “rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline” and, critically, citing his access to nuclear codes as a specific reason his removal was required with “the greatest urgency.” That last detail matters. The physicians did not merely warn of erratic behavior. They warned of erratic behavior in the specific context of unilateral nuclear authority — the exact authority the Pentagon is now drafting doctrine to expand.
The practical barriers are real. Section 4 requires Vice President JD Vance and a majority of a Trump Cabinet — a body composed of loyalists — to act. That will not happen. Raskin’s commission bill will not clear a Republican-controlled House. These are honest political facts.
But practical barriers do not settle constitutional questions. The framers of the 25th Amendment did not include Section 4 for easy cases. They included it for hard ones — for a president who could not or would not recognize his own diminished capacity, in a moment when the risk of that diminished capacity was measured in the lives of millions. That is the definition of this moment. The concurrence of a Pentagon review to make nuclear options more usable, an expired arms control regime, a president who publicly threatens civilizational destruction, and a bench of physicians warning about his cognitive state is not a coincidence. It is a constitutional emergency in slow motion. The failure of Vance and this Cabinet to act does not mean the case is not warranted. It means the case is warranted and the guardrails have been captured.
VI. The Sale, and the Reality
Expect this Pentagon review to be sold — indeed, it is already being sold — as a routine update to nuclear posture, a prudent adaptation to a world in which China and Russia are both nuclear peers with tactical stockpiles of their own. Expect the phrase “extended deterrence” to do heavy work. Expect defense officials to emphasize that no policy has been adopted, that the review is preliminary, that congressional consultation will happen in due course. Expect careful language about how the goal is to prevent escalation, not to invite it.
None of this addresses the core question. That question is not whether America needs a nuclear posture. It has one. That question is not whether adversary developments require American response. They may. The question is what it says about a president’s priorities that, faced with a choice between constraining nuclear risk and expanding presidential nuclear options, he has consistently chosen the latter. He let New START expire. He is presiding over a Pentagon drafting doctrine to give him more usable weapons. He retains, under existing American law, the sole authority to launch. And he is doing all of this while a growing chorus of his own former officials, sitting lawmakers, physicians, and even foreign leaders describe him in terms that would, in any prior administration, have triggered a constitutional review of his capacity.
What this says about Donald Trump’s leadership is what it has said from the beginning: that the man reaches, always and without exception, for the tool that concentrates power in his own hands, and away from every institution designed to check him. A treaty with Russia constrains him; he lets it die. An arsenal designed for last-resort use limits him; he authorizes a review to give himself more options. A Constitution provides for his removal in emergencies; his party ensures the guardrails are not deployed. This is not a governing philosophy. It is a pattern of accumulation, and its endpoint — in a nuclear context — is not an abstraction. It is measured in cities.
Editorial Conclusion
A leader worthy of the codes would be spending his presidency finding ways to make nuclear weapons harder to use, not easier. He would be extending arms control, not letting it expire. He would be raising the threshold for launch, not commissioning doctrines that lower it. What is being drafted inside the Pentagon this month is not modernization. It is the paperwork of a normalization — the quiet rewriting of what nuclear war is for. And it is being written for a president 36 physicians have told the Congressional Record is unfit to hold the weapons already in his hands. The constitutional mechanism to address this exists. Whether this country has the political will to use it before an American president crosses the nuclear threshold in some regional war is the only question that will matter in the end.
Sources & References
- NBC News — Pentagon drafting a new U.S. nuclear strategy in case of regional war with China or Russia, sources say (Aug. 5, 2026)
- Breaking Defense — Pentagon wants ‘expanding options’ for nuclear weapons, officials say (Aug. 7, 2026)
- The Defense Post — Pentagon Considers New Nuclear Strategy to Deter Regional Wars (Aug. 7, 2026)
- Arms Control Association — New START Expires As U.S. Urges ‘Modernized’ Treaty (March 2026)
- Brookings Institution — What comes after New START? (Feb. 23, 2026)
- Congressional Research Service — Extension of New START Central Limits: Overview of the Expert Debate
- U.S. Department of State — New START Treaty — Official Overview
- Sen. Merkley’s Office — Bipartisan Letter to President Trump on New START Expiration (Feb. 6, 2026)
- ICAN — The expiration of New START: what it means and what’s next (Feb. 4, 2026)
- The Hill (Opinion) — Concerns Grow Over Trump’s Mental Fitness for Presidency (June 2026)
- The Hill — Rep. Jamie Raskin introduces bill to assess president’s fitness under 25th Amendment (April 14, 2026)
- Rep. Krishnamoorthi — Krishnamoorthi Calls for President Trump’s Removal Under 25th Amendment (April 7, 2026)
- The New Republic — Trump’s Delusional Election Fraud Speech Sparks 25th Amendment Calls (July 17, 2026)
- Deseret News — A medical check for the commander-in-chief? Democrats introduce Trump fitness bill (April 14, 2026)
- Sen. Markey’s Office — Statement on President Trump Assuming Control of the Nuclear Football (Jan. 22, 2025)
- Sen. Warren’s Office / USA Today — No president should have unilateral power to use nuclear weapons — Sen. Warren and Sec. Perry
- Beyond Nuclear International — Sole Control: The president’s unchecked nuclear authority (Feb. 2, 2025)
- Fox News — Elbridge Colby confirmed to top Pentagon policy post after hesitation from GOP hawks
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