Mark Schneider: China and Russia are ramping up their nuclear forces

Dr. Mark Schneider discusses recent Russian and Chinese nuclear force deployments and whether these constitute a significant ramping up of the threat we are facing from those quarters.

“There is no question we are seeing a very serious expansion in both Chinese and Russian nuclear forces and in both cases their capabilities are probably significantly larger than they are generally given credit for.”

Dr. Schneider also explains that we are  witnessing some deployments that are rather alarming:

“The Russians in December- and this is typical, they do this every year- released a lot of information on their plans for strategic nuclear forces and there are some major developments, things that I didn’t even expect in one case. They announced in December two additional ballistic missile submarines, and more significant than that they announced a program to deploy 20 regimens of the sarmat heavy ICBM- that’s the most destructive weapon that would exit. It is not yet operational, it will be in the next few years. But when it becomes operational it will be the most destructive weapon created.”

Dr. Schneider later characterizes Trump’s proposed funding increase for our nuclear deterrent:

“Trump has proposed a significant increase, long overdue by the way, in funding for our nuclear deterrent forces. If you compare it to what the Russians have been doing for the last 20 years, it’s fairly small. They are modernizing constantly, every time they introduce a new system they start work on the next system, either improving that version or creating a new system to replace it with. In the US case, we are doing the minimum modernizations to sustain the triad.”

Listen to the full interview here