Adm. Charles Richard, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, was back in action yesterday hyping up the nuclear threat supposedly emanating from Russia and China. “Today, we face two nuclear-capable near-peers who have the capability to unilaterally escalate to any level of violence in any domain worldwide with any instrument of national power at any time” including nuclear weapons, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We have never faced a situation before like that in our history.”
Recent actions by Russia and China have alarmed Richard and other top U.S. officials, he argued, including their tests of next-generation hypersonic weapons, investments in other nuclear modernization efforts, their recent increases in nuclear drills and training, and Russia’s attack on Ukraine, reports Stars & Stripes.
Richard said his command has long prepared for similar scenarios to those Putin has launched since the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. STRATCOM has trained to respond to the “limited nuclear [weapons] use in a conventional aggression scenario,” such as Putin’s attack on Ukraine, he said. So far, the admiral said, “nothing has happened that we didn’t anticipate, that we hadn’t thought about and hadn’t prepared for.” If it came down to it, Richard said his “forces are ready right now to do anything [President Joe Biden] asked us to do.”
