Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall expressed his concern over China’s nuclear arsenal expansion and warned of its greater implications during a House hearing on Tuesday.
Kendall appeared before the House Appropriations Committee on March 28 to discuss the $215.1 billion budget request for Fiscal Year 2024.
During this meeting, Kendall told lawmakers, “I don’t think I’ve seen anything more disturbing in my career than the Chinese ongoing expansion of their nuclear force,” per Fox News.
Kendall has accumulated a great deal of experience in matters related to defense and national security over a 50-year-long career in government, the private defense industry, and the military.
Drawing a parallel between the tensions surrounding China, Russia, and the United States today and those seen during the Cold War, Kendall emphasized the need to start a dialogue to prevent nuclear escalation.
The Cold War was a four-decade-long period rife with geopolitical tension, with the U.S. and the Soviet Union standing at the heart of it.
Engaging in proxy wars and stockpiling nuclear weapons at dizzying rates, the two superpowers seemed to be hurdling toward an inevitable conflict. This trajectory shifted with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) that began in the late 1960s.
China’s nuclear program had been a subject of concern for the U.S. and its allies long before Kendall’s recent warning, per Fox News.
Since coming to power in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping has put the country on a nationalistic path that aims to strengthen its economic, social, and military might.
This “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” aims to be achieved by 2049 and includes forging a modernized military to expand its control in Taiwan.
The alarm bells truly went off among U.S. officials when a report from the Pentagon announced in late 2022 that China was aiming to triple its nuclear warhead stockpile by 2035.
China’s nuclear stockpile had surpassed 400 warheads and the Pentagon predicted in the report that it would reach nearly 1,500 warheads by 2035, per Fox News.
“For decades, they were quite comfortable with an arsenal of a few hundred nuclear weapons, which was fairly clearly a second-strike capability to act as a deterrent,” Kendall said during the hearing, per Fox News. “That expansion that they’re undertaking puts us into a new world that we’ve never lived in before, where you have three powers — three great powers, essentially — with large arsenals of nuclear weapons.”
As The Dallas Express reported last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to grow the country’s nuclear capabilities. This came days after he announced his withdrawal from the New START treaty signed between Washington and Moscow to limit the number of long-range nuclear warheads each can deploy.
Kendall said during the hearing that this was definitely bringing the situation “in the wrong direction,” per Fox News.
“Nobody wants a nuclear war. We do not want to go back to [the Cold War] world of 30 years ago. I thought we would never be in this position again, and here we are. So, we need to be wise. We really need to start talking to them,” Kendall said.