During the Cold War, the United States maintained a diverse arsenal of nuclear weapons to support deter Soviet aggression. This arsenal included land-based, theater-range missiles operated by the U.S. Army. Such systems complicated Soviet decision-making and provided the President with additional, credible options to respond to escalation.
The Army retired all its nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War and largely exited the nuclear mission. At the same time, the overall number of non-strategic U.S. nuclear weapons plummeted, going from roughly 7,000 nuclear weapons in Europe at the height of the Cold War to roughly 200 today.
However, 35 years since the end of the Cold War, Russia and China are expanding and modernizing their non-strategic nuclear arsenals and increasingly relying on nuclear coercion to achieve their aims. Russia has violated virtually all nuclear arms control treaties and possesses a large advantage in the number of deployed non-strategic nuclear weapons. Meanwhile China is the fastest growing nuclear power on the planet, fielding nuclear capable anti-ship and land-attack missiles, which has eroded America’s deterrent.
Consequently, the United States must adapt both its conventional and nuclear strategic deterrent posture. In this vein, the Army should rejoin the Navy and the Air Force in the nuclear mission and once again assume responsibility for providing mobile, land-based nuclear capabilities to strengthen deterrence, hedge against growing strategic risks, and ensure the President has the tools needed to respond flexibly to nuclear escalation.
Through much of the Cold War, the Army fielded various non-strategic nuclear weapons, ranging from small artillery-based munitions to ballistic missiles. The Lance and Pershing II ballistic missiles were low-yield, theater-ranged ballistic missiles that provided the President with additional options to hold enemy targets at risk, thereby strengthening America’s theater deterrent posture.
Today, the United States maintains only one type of forward deployed non-strategic nuclear weapon, the B-61 gravity bomb—a relic of the Cold War that can be delivered by nuclear capable fighter-bombers.
While necessary and useful, such gravity bombs are not stand-off and must be dropped close to a target, potentially over enemy air space and potentially in a contested air environment, where enemy planes and air defenses may be operating. To alleviate some risk, a large entourage of conventional support aircraft would be required, which could likely reduce the operational tempo of the U.S. air campaign.
Alternatively, the presence of mobile, ground-based nuclear options would increase the range of objectives able to be targeted, as the range of the missiles themselves are in the hundreds to even thousands of kilometers.
These challenges of distance are magnified in the Indo-Pacific, where the lack of forward-deployed assets and the reliance on short-range delivery platforms like the B61 gravity bomb severely limits credible options and highlights the advantages of ground-based options such as Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles (GLCM) and Ground-Launched Ballistic Missiles (GLBM).
Ground-based systems are mobile and concealable, making them survivable to preemptive attacks by an adversary. GLCMs are maneuverable, have small radar cross sections, and often fly relatively close to the ground, making them less detectable by radar.
GLBMs are significantly faster and often larger than GLCMs, but more easily detected by radar. They can be made with maneuverable reentry vehicles, though, which aids in the penetration of adversary air and missile defenses.
Intermediate-range GLBMs, particularly those that have maneuverable or hypersonic reentry vehicles, are ideally suited for the Indo-Pacific given their extended range and the lack of basing options in that theater.
Further, ground-launched systems are prompt, highly likely to penetrate adversary defenses, effective against a range of targets, survivable, and can be forward deployed in Europe and Asia. This latter characteristic is important, in that forward deployment in allied countries assures and allies in a way that forces generated within the United States cannot be—and also be available immediately without requiring a deployment decision or sending potentially undesirable signaling.
The military maintains thousands of retired nuclear warheads at Kirtland Underground Munitions Maintenance and Storage Complex in New Mexico. If the Army’s new Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) were made nuclear capable, it would provide a highly accurate ground-based, theater-ranged non-strategic nuclear weapon that would give the President additional ways to respond to nuclear escalation and strengthen the country’s deterrent effect at the theater level.
The Army is perfectly suited to the task, given their specialization in ground-based warfare and weapon systems and their Cold War legacy of being a nuclear service. The U.S. Army also could take initiative by examining the utility of integrating nuclear warheads in their forthcoming Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, which would provide a low-yield and highly survivable nuclear weapon.
The United States walk-back from non-strategic nuclear weapons—and the Army’s divestment from the nuclear mission—made sense during the post-Cold War era. But the U.S. Army’s withdrawal from land-based, theater-range nuclear capabilities has created a gap in deterrence, especially as Russia and China expand their tactical nuclear arsenals and missile technologies.
To regain its edge, the U.S. must reintegrate mobile, tactical nuclear weapons resembling the Pershing II and Lance missiles, and invest in nuclear-capable hypersonic systems. Nuclear-capable GLCMs and GLBMs would provide the U.S. with flexible, credible deterrence options, countering the growing threats from adversaries and ensuring a robust response to nuclear escalation.
‘Robert Peters is a Senior Research Fellow for Strategic Deterrence at the Heritage Foundation.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.