
The U.S. “will have to out-think” Russia and China to prevent them from using nuclear weapons to resolve a future crisis, the outgoing head of the National Nuclear Security Administration said last week.
Answering an audience question at the Hudson Institute, Jill Hruby said, “just building a lot of weapons over the long run does not seem like a winning strategy” for deterrence. She added, “we’re going to be in a big competition with Russia and China” in the decade ahead.
As she leaves office, Hruby pointed to the modernized and variety of weapons in the Kremlin’s arsenal and to Beijing’s accelerated nuclear weapons procurement and deployment, aided by “its gigantic economy.”
In her opening remarks, Hruby said, “for the first time in our history, we must prepare for a world with two nuclear peers. China is different [from Russia] because we are facing a nuclear adversary that is also an economic peer and an important global trade and technology influencer.”
Looking at what Russia has embarked on since she took office and its invasion of Ukraine, Hruby said, “we can reflect on how that conflict has involved both novel and traditional nuclear threats. In the early months of the invasion, Russia ransacked Chernobyl and then occupied the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Warfighting in nuclear zones has raised concerns about the potentially catastrophic consequences and introduced new considerations in 21st century warfare.”
Over this same period, she added Moscow “frequently resorted” to nuclear saber-rattling and “de-ratified” the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Hruby raised the specter that in the future Russia may share nuclear weapons technology with North Korea and Iran in return for their continued support in the Ukrainian war.
China, on the other hand, has created nuclear policies that “are intentionally opaque, and their willingness to engage in dialogue has been limited.” She added, “it appears they are moving from a no-first-use policy to a launch-on-warning strategy given silo construction and the development of advanced warning systems.”
Hruby said, “given the ongoing conflicts, the potential for violating the nuclear taboo is now conceivable and new nuclear threat vectors have emerged. These realities also raise the likelihood of proliferation.
When asked about the possibility of an ally like South Korea embarking on its own nuclear weapons program, Hruby said, “I think we can all understand why they feel this way.” But the reality means continuous large-scale investment.

“We need to be clear that if you’re going to be a nuclear weapons state the responsibilities are very high. Not only does it take a lot of money, expenditures upfront, it takes it forever.”
Hruby, in her remarks, described the steps the United States is taking now to bring its nuclear enterprise from infrastructure to weapons systems production and delivery and continued reliability up to date. She noted that some of the facilities she oversaw dated back to World War II.
On the Navy’s Sea-Launched Cruise Missile – Nuclear, or SLCM-N, authorized and funded in the Fiscal Year 2024 budget, she said NNSA and the Pentagon “are looking for options that satisfy the deterrence need and interface appropriately with Navy delivery systems, while putting the least amount of stress on our busy enterprise.”
Initial operational capability was set for 2034 in the authorization bill. Pete Hegseth, nominated to be secretary of defense, said at his confirmation hearing last week that he wanted to take “a look under the hood” at SLCM-N.
“With our eyes wide open. We have laid out a path to sustain credible nuclear development” for the incoming Trump administration, said Hruby.
“This is the most difficult time NNSA has faced since the Manhattan Project. Several realities create today’s environment including shifting geopolitical conditions; the age of the U.S. nuclear stockpile and the age of the infrastructure in the nuclear security enterprise; the rapid pace of technological advance, especially artificial intelligence; and the breakdown of many nuclear norms and guardrails.”
The Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of modernizing nuclear forces from 2023 to 2032 at $756 billion, based upon forecasts that year. Those estimates were more than $120 billion higher than CBO’s two years earlier.
Hruby added, “not all is gloom and doom.”
Citing alliances’ value, Hruby said one lesson of COVID was the necessity of building resilience in the supply chain. “If something were to go wrong … there would be some availability to rely on” as with the United Kingdom, “and vice-versa” to maintain the nuclear enterprise.
She said, “we continue to work with Japan and South Korea, including in new trilateral science and technology efforts. New alliances, notably AUKUS, have been formed that help us respond to the shifting global dynamics.” Adding later, “there are lots of experiments going on, and I think they will be fruitful.”
Brandon Williams, a one-term New York congressman and former Navy submarine officer, has been nominated to succeed Hruby, a mechanical engineer with more than 30 years of experience in nuclear programs.
Among questions Williams is likely to face is the Trump administration’s position on resuming nuclear weapons testing in Nevada. In his first administration, the resumption of testing was discussed, but not acted on. The United States has not tested nuclear weapons since 1992.
As the administrations change, Hruby said, “now is the time to define the needs beyond the 2030s so that we can prepare the infrastructure for them. Recent Russian and Chinese developments suggest we need to do more thinking around hard and deep targets, space-based capabilities, non-ballistic missiles, and more.”
“This will be tricky,” she said.