According to The New York Times, the White House did not publicly announce its revised strategy, named Nuclear Employment Guidance.

The highly classified document, updated every four years, only exists on paper in the hands of a small cohort of national security officials and Pentagon commanders. There are no electronic versions.

However, the pivot towards China was alluded to in carefully calibrated public comments by two senior administration officials, ahead of a more detailed, unclassified notification of Congress.

Pranay Vaddi, the National Security Council’s senior director for arms control and nonproliferation, indicated that the document was the first to examine whether the US was ready to respond to simultaneous or sequential nuclear crises.

Mr Vaddi said the new strategy emphasised “the need to deter Russia, the PRC and North Korea simultaneously,” referring to the People’s Republic of China.

Separately, Vipin Narang, another official and a professor of nuclear security at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the president had “recently issued updated nuclear weapons employment guidance to account for multiple nuclear-armed adversaries”.

He added that the guidance had, in particular, accounted for “the significant increase in the size and diversity” of China’s nuclear arsenal.