The US Department of Defence is drafting a new nuclear strategy for potential regional conflicts with Russia or China that explicitly weighs the use of shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons, TASS reported on August 5, citing NBC News sources.

The classified review is being overseen by Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon's under secretary of defence for policy, and is intended to prevent a conventional war from escalating into a nuclear one while denying an adversary any advantage in doing so -- a departure from decades of settled US nuclear policy, according to the NBC News report.

The reassessment reflects growing urgency inside the Pentagon since New START, the last remaining US-Russia strategic arms control treaty, lapsed in February 2026 – the last of the Cold War missile security deals in place. Some have argued that the end of the Cold War era security agreements has cleared the way for the start of a new arms race. But the plans, described to NBC News by five people familiar with the matter, reflect internal Defence Department planning rather than adopted policy.

The review comes against a backdrop of both prospective adversaries hardening their own nuclear posture. Russia had already signalled a shift in September 2024, when Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Moscow was preparing to loosen its nuclear-use rules in response to the West's "escalation strategy", IntelliNews reported at the time. This was part of a new and more aggressive foreign policy concept adopted in March 2023 that identified “friendly countries” and downgraded everyone else to adversaries.

President Vladimir Putin formalised the  nuclear policy changes with a decree in November 2024, reserving the right to respond with nuclear weapons to a conventional attack that creates an "existential threat" to Russia's sovereignty or territorial integrity -- or to that of ally Belarus -- a broader trigger than the previous 2020 doctrine's threshold of an attack threatening "the very existence of the state," Arms Control Association reported. What would constitute an existential threat to Russia has never been defined.

Moscow has since backed the doctrine with increasingly overt signalling. On May 12, Russia successfully test-fired an RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, and days later, from May 19-21, staged a snap exercise of its full nuclear triad involving 64,000 troops, 200 missile launchers, 140 aircraft and 13 submarines, eight of them strategic missile carriers -- the two events following, respectively, a scaled-back Victory Day parade and a large Ukrainian drone strike on Moscow, according to a close correlation flagged by the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP). The timing, DGAP researchers wrote, is consistent with Russia's "escalate to de-escalate" doctrine, under which Moscow uses nuclear signalling to compensate for battlefield setbacks.

China, meanwhile, has continued a rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal even as it publicly maintains a decades-old no-first-use pledge. A white paper issued in November 2025 reaffirmed that policy, but the Pentagon estimates China's stockpile has grown to around 600 operational warheads – about a fifth of the US and Russian arsenals – and projects it will reach roughly 1,000 by 2030, with Beijing also developing faster early-warning, command-and-control and rapid-response systems that outside analysts say could support a launch-on-warning posture for its silo-based forces, Arms Control Association reported.

Washington's own strategic thinking has lurched too. A 2025 National Security Strategy, quietly published on the White House website on December 5, 2025, described a unipolar worldview that could put the US "on a collision course" with both China and Russia. The Pentagon's own National Defence Strategy, released just seven weeks later on January 23, 2026 under the title "Restoring Peace Through Strength for a New Golden Age of America," pivoted sharply toward home: it names defending the US homeland and the Western Hemisphere as the top priority, casts China policy as "strength, not confrontation," and mentions Russia only in passing -- a marked change of emphasis from the NSS six weeks earlier, even as the strategy still commits to "a robust and modern nuclear deterrent capable of addressing the strategic threats to our country."

The nuclear review also lands in the vacuum left by the collapse of the last US-Russia arms-control architecture. New START, which capped both countries' deployed strategic warheads and launchers, expired on February 5, 2026 without a successor, ending three decades of binding Cold War-era limits on the two countries' arsenals -- a moment IntelliNews explored in an op-ed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio published days after the treaty's expiry, tracing the Cold War history of US-Soviet arms control and what its absence now means.