WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has launched a review of America’s nuclear posture, focused on providing more “options” for the White House, two top officials said this week.
The comments come after over a decade of concerns that Russia and China are developing lower-yield “tactical” nuclear warheads, while the US arsenal is largely reliant on heavier “strategic” nuclear weapons. The theory is that a foreign country could use lower-yield weapons and lock the US president into a no-win situation: either not responding, or having to respond with overwhelming, world-ending force.
The start of the review was announced by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby during a keynote speech Wednesday. In his comments, Colby repeatedly emphasized the term “options,” though he stressed that as of right now, he had “no announcement of any kind of change” regarding the Pentagon’s nuclear policy.
“There’s, you know, a review or sort of relook at the employment guidance, which is more about the commander of STRATCOM [Strategic Command] and his responsibilities and [the defense] secretary’s authorities, etcetera,” he said in Omaha, Neb., during the 2026 Deterrence Symposium. Colby also noted that the review will not be released to the general public.
Colby’s comments were not publicly broadcast, but a copy of the audio was shared with Breaking Defense. They came hours after NBC first reported that the review is expected to emphasize the possibility of using shorter-range tactical weapons if there is a regional war with China or Russia.
On center stage, Colby didn’t dovetail into that level of specificity but broadly touched on the topic of regional wars and a growing focus on smaller, tactical nuclear weapons as a way to limit mass destruction, saying the US needs more “rational nuclear options” to respond.
“What I would fear more” than a “mass attack” on the US, he said, “is a regional war …kind of local war, a conventional war that might have local employment, God forbid, of [nuclear] weapons that could escalate from there.”
US Strategic Command head Adm. Richard Correll hosted a call with reporters about the review shortly after Colby got off stage.
While he declined to comment on internal Pentagon discussions, Correll emphasized that the US has not changed its declaratory policy when it comes to nuclear and strategic capabilities, and the department is looking at ways of “expanding options” available to the president and providing the “decision space for any conceivable escalation scenario.”
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“The way I think about that,” the four-star admiral said, “is escalation maneuver.
“I think about it much more broadly than our nuclear capability,” Correll added. “[It] is from our exquisite non-kinetic capability to our conventional capability, to if you would envision, some kind of limited nuclear exchange to high-end escalation.”
Those theater needs, he explained, require a “diversity” of platforms and launchers, while also creating “ambiguity” for the other side about what is actually in the region.
“By doing that, you raise the threshold for consideration of theater nuclear employment by any potential adversary,” the four-star admiral said. “So it is about deterrence first and foremost.”
Stanton Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Ankit Panda said that US strategists “traditionally” link smaller nuclear warheads to the start of an escalation ladder.
“In the context of today’s nuclear environment, the key question is whether or not the US will try to keep ahead of Russia and China simultaneously with damage limitation capabilities — especially by the mid-2030s,” he told Breaking Defese. “The administration’s choice to prioritize regional capabilities suggests the answer, at least in the short-term, is no.”
“That doesn’t mean the US will move away from sustaining damage limitation capabilities for either Russia or China; it does mean the two-front simultaneous damage limitation problem is being punted for another day,” Panda added.
The nuclear review comes at a time when the administration is working to modernize its nuclear triad, an effort that goes back to the Obama administration as part of a trade-off to get Congress to sign onto the Iran nuclear deal. That modernization wave included upgrading the B61 nuclear gravity bomb, the W88 warhead used by the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, and the W93, which will be used on Ohio- and Columbia-class subs.
Since that Obama-era effort began, however, two new “low-yield” weapons have been funded, under the aegis of giving the White House a way to use nuclear weapons without resorting to “last resort” use of larger yield weapons. During the first Trump administration, a sea-launched cruise missile known as the SLCM-N was launched. And under the Biden administration, a lower-yield version of the B61, the B61-13, was approved.
Given that context, it is possible the upcoming review may conclude that more tactical nuclear weapons are needed. Warhead development is managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous arm of the Department of Energy, while the delivery systems are managed by the Defense Department.