OVER THE next ten to twenty years, the erosion of American nuclear superiority will have major ramifications for the global balance of power. It will place new constraints on our freedom of action and lead our friends and foes alike to doubt the credibility of all instruments of U.S. power. As a result, decades-old alliance structures may fracture amid a drift toward multipolarity. Leadership from Tokyo to Riyadh to Seoul may find new incentives to develop their own deterrents as the relative power of states like Russia and China increases. With our extended-deterrent power lost, the international system will change—and not in Washington’s favor. But this scenario is preventable if policy makers cast away the illusion of safety and act quickly to correct a trend which has plagued Washington for nearly two decades.

The giant has feet of clay. Though today the United States is widely seen to be dominant in almost every aspect of military power, and the expectation is that it will remain so, an examination of its nuclear forces and infrastructure reveals that its position is far from assured. The critical question is not whether the United States enjoys a strategic advantage in the area of nuclear forces presently, but rather what the forces and nuclear infrastructures of the United States and its competitors will look like ten or twenty years from now. If Washington does not modernize, Russia could acquire a nuclear advantage within the next two decades.

The United States faces major problems in the maintenance of its nuclear forces and infrastructure. It is the only nuclear country that cannot manufacture a new nuclear weapon because of a self-imposed moratorium, which has halted the modernization of warheads and delivery systems alike. Even though Washington possesses an unparalleled capacity to modernize, Congress has failed to fund any new nuclear initiatives. Strategic forces have been continually overlooked by Department of Defense and air-force leadership because of a constant de-emphasis on the role of nuclear weapons within the halls of the Pentagon. This began after the cold war and has only been accelerated by doctrinal shifts outlined in documents like the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, which argued that advanced conventional munitions could supplant nuclear forces in certain instances. But the problem of leadership on this issue extends across the Potomac to Capitol Hill. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle simply fail to understand the ongoing strategic military competition in which the United States finds itself, where the major powers are continuously jockeying for advantage.