WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 13th January, 2022) US President Joe Biden is weighing in on dismantling a number of nuclear weapons programs, brought to life under former President Donald Trump, as part of the Nuclear Posture Review nearing completion, Politico reported citing current and former US officials.
The Nuclear Posture Review is expected to be finalized next month and to introduce insignificant changes to the existing US nuclear policy, the report said on Wednesday.
The Biden administration will unlikely go as far as to introduce any major cuts to the Defense Department plans to build new intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines with nuclear weapons and stealth bombers, the officials said.
The main considerations involve a debate among national security officials on whether the US needs a new nuclear-armed missile being developed at the moment and whether it makes sense to retire a Cold War-era thermonuclear bomb, the report said.
In parallel, the national security officials are pondering whether to halt such Trump-era "add-ons" as low-yield warheads that were deployed on submarines by the previous administration, the report added.
The Biden team is also considering changing the wording of the US nuclear weapons policy from Trump's "deterring nuclear attack is not the sole purpose of nuclear weapons" to a more reserved one that states that the role of nuclear weapons is fundamentally to deter the use of other nuclear weapons, according to the report.
