Pentagon chief: Russia, N. Korea most likely to use ‘smaller’ scale nuke attacks

The most likely use of nuclear weapons today would be “smaller” scale attacks by Russia or North Korea, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Monday.

“It is a sobering fact that the most likely use of nuclear weapons today is not the massive nuclear exchange of the classic Cold War-type,” Carter said during a visit to Minot Air Force Base, N.D.  

{mosads}Rather, he said, attacks would be “the unwise resort to smaller but still unprecedentedly terrible attacks, for example by Russia or North Korea, to try to coerce a conventionally superior opponent to back off or abandon an ally during a crisis.” 

Carter said the U.S. was working with allies in both Europe and East Asia to innovate and operate “in new ways” to maintain deterrence and preserve the status quo. 

In Europe, he said, the U.S. was “refreshing” the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s playbook to deter Russia from thinking it could benefit from using a nuclear weapon in a conflict with the alliance.

“Now, obviously, we do not seek such a conflict to begin with; rather, we seek to prevent one,” he said. 

U.S. relations with Russia have soured after Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2014 and annexed the peninsula of Crimea. 

Carter also appealed for continued investment in the U.S. nuclear enterprise. He said in 2017, the Pentagon’s budget would invest $19 billion in the nuclear enterprise, as part of a $108 billion over five year effort to sustain and recapitalize the nuclear force and associated systems. 

“Doing this will cost money, of course, but most people don’t realize that funding for the nuclear enterprise is a small percentage of total defense funding,” he said. 

“In the end, though, this is about maintaining the bedrock of our security. And after too many years of not investing enough, it’s an investment that we as a nation have to make, because it’s critical to sustaining nuclear deterrence in the 21st century.”