NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — The head of the U.S. Strategic Command on Wednesday told a roomful of military personnel to produce the nuclear weapons needed to counter pressure from Russia and China.

“We now have two nuclear peers,” Air Force Gen. Anthony Cotton, commander of United States Strategic Command, said in a panel on “the nuclear imperative” at the 2024 Air, Space & Cyber Conference in Washington Wednesday. “We’ve never had a strategy that had to deal with that.”

With the Air Force in the middle of a program-wide review of the ground-based, nuclear-tipped Sentinel missile, Cotton told the room, “you have to produce so that I can present.”

Cotton told the Monitor in August at the 2024 U.S. Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium in Omaha, Neb. that he does not believe that a sudden surge in deployment of ground-based missiles would “perturb” or overextend the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

Cotton has also said that while the NNSA’s current target of making 30 pits annually by 2028 will meet military needs, he is not “satisfied” with 30 pits.

The first new pits, first-stage nuclear-warhead cores, were to be cast at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The pits will go into Sentinel’s planned W87-1 warheads, which the missiles will use some time after the initial deployment.

Northrop Grumman is building Sentinel to replace the current Minuteman III fleet some time after 2030.

“It is imperative that we understand that it is not a department imperative that we maintain nuclear security, it is a national imperative,” Cotton said Wednesday. “Our allies and partners are counting on Congress more than ever.”

Cotton spoke with Congress poised to vote on a short term spending bill to keep the government operating when fiscal year 2024 ends after Sept. 30. Under any continuing resolution, NNSA would get less than requested for 2025.

The House’s Republican majority on Wednesday afternoon was queueing up a vote on a six-month continuing resolution, which many pro-defense lawmakers oppose on the grounds that it stops the Pentagon’s budget from growing for too long.

Lawmakers including Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, and Rep. Charles Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), the chair of the House Appropriations Energy and Water Development subcommittee, have said they prefer a three-month continuing resolution.