Nuclear issues are very much in the news now. Last year, senior US military officials quietly warned US officials that China’s nuclear build-up poses a serious threat to the United States.
In late summer, satellite images of several missile fields with hundreds of Chinese missile silos – completed or under construction – were then revealed to the public. They comprise over 350 silos.
While skeptics initially dismissed the silos as nothing more than wind farms, it soon became apparent that the Chinese were building massive new nuclear capacity that could in a short time equal or significantly exceed the totality of the strategic nuclear forces stationed by the US.
And so a debate began in the United States about what it all meant. For example, how many missiles are actually being placed in the more than 350 silos that China has completed or are under construction?
If the DF-41 ballistic ICBM were the Chinese missile of choice, each missile could carry six to ten warheads attached to a future nuclear force high end of new estimates suggests.
Another part of the debate centered around the question of whether the long-held belief that China has very limited stocks of nuclear weapons is still valid. Is China’s warhead fuel supply controlled by China’s warhead fuel supply? Or is China’s goal to have the largest possible nuclear force? In short, is it nuclear fuel or the missiles themselves that are fueling Chinese rearmament?
Even more important than the “what” of the discovered structure is the “why”. What is China trying to achieve politically, diplomatically and militarily, and what impact would this have on the security of the US and the Allies?
The good news is that the recent discoveries have moved the debate about China’s nuclear future from mere guesswork to a more fact-based debate.
In three key areas, skeptics – who had previously concluded that China’s minimal nuclear force were only representative of the “peaceful rise” of a growing but good-natured nation – changed their minds.
Chinese hawks and pigeons shared similar views in three key areas.
The first occurred in early 2021 when skeptic Tom Cochran of the National Resources Defense Council and hawk Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center published an in-depth assessment of China’s nuclear fuel production, which concluded that China was likely to produce enough nuclear fuel for 1,270 warheads could – almost as many nuclear warheads are used by the US on ICBMs every day.
But more interestingly, Sokolski and Cochran also assessed that, under certain reasonable guise, China could produce 2,500 bombs worth of nuclear fuel, a dramatic ten-fold increase of the 250 warheads US intelligence believes are now being used by China.
Subsequently, the US Department of Defense forecast that China would deploy 1,000 warheads by 2030, a four-fold increase from its earlier estimates.
Although many China Hawks believed that China’s plans would include warhead deployment in the thousands, the Federation of American Scientists nuclear skeptics accepted the planned deployment of 1,000 and then changed their description of China’s nuclear strategy from “minimal” to “medium”. This represents a second important change from the long-accepted historical narrative, widely accepted by disarmament advocates, that China adhered to a strategy of using only a harmless, cautious “minimal” nuclear deterrent.
The significance of this change lies in how it affects US perception of why China maintains nuclear weapons. When China abandoned its “minimal” deterrent strategy of targeting only American cities (as opposed to US endangered nuclear and military assets), it became plausible that China, like Russia, was seeking a pre-emptive first strike: an “escalation -to-win “strategy in which China’s nuclear forces can serve military” coercive objectives “and not just serve as a defensive deterrent.
Unfortunately, despite the positive development in which the skeptics of the Chinese military power accepted more realistic assessments of China’s nuclear ambitions yesterday, uncertain assumptions are still widespread.
For example, many skeptics of Chinese military power have historically opposed a robust US nuclear deterrent because it is unnecessary to deter China’s “minimal” deterrent and would provoke an arms race with China (and Russia).
Instead of holding China responsible for starting serious arms control negotiations, China has often received a permit. As nuclear experts Mathew Kroenig and Dan Negrea of the Atlantic Council recently stated, China refused to come to the table while the US administrations pushed for arms control talks while China “agreed to widespread nuclear expansion.”
One of the reasons China feels free to take such a rigid position is because there is no pressure on China to change course. Most American groups that support arms control, including unilateral US cuts, do not even require China to provide the transparency necessary to determine the exact dimensions of its nuclear forces – without which arms deals are not credible. How can you verify an agreement where you do not know the accuracy of what the other party said? There was a reason former President Ronald Reagan repeatedly warned that gun deals are about “Trust but Verify.”
Third, the disarmament community also maintains the worrying assumption that China’s decision to build and deploy 1,000 warheads by 2030 is the fault of the United States. They apparently argue that China is building its nuclear force because the United States built 44 missile interceptors in 2003-2004 to protect itself from rogue states like North Korea and Iran. Hence, China needs to overcome such defenses in order to have a credible deterrent.
However, if you don’t find the missile defense explanation credible, the skeptics have an alternative explanation. The Chinese nuclear expansion is a reasonable Chinese response to the United States engaging in a “nuclear arms race” or threatening a nuclear first strike against China. But this argument falls flat. When the US nuclear modernization is complete, the US will have no more nuclear warheads than it currently uses under the New START treaty of 2010, and nearly 90 percent fewer than at the height of the Cold War.
Which begs the interesting question: How can an arms control agreement supported by skeptics (the new START treaty of 2010) also fuel an arms race that the skeptics reject?
While it is encouraging to see some experts “coming together” in their assessments of China’s emerging nuclear strategy, there are still myriad factors to question the accuracy of the intelligence services’ new assessment that China’s nuclear armament will only reach 1,000 warheads by the end of this Decade, in about nine years.
The estimate of 1,000 warheads assumes that China will expand its arsenal by an average of less than ten DF-41 missiles and seventy warheads per year.
For comparison, sixty years ago, between 1962 and 1966, the United States built 800 Minuteman silos and missiles with an average speed of 0.6 per day or a top speed of 1.8 per day!
Given the US construction capacity, I estimate that China – currently extremely capable of construction projects – could build and deploy missiles for the entire 350 missile field in two to four years.
Given China’s stance on nuclear transparency and arms control, what are the chances that cooperation with China will reduce China’s nuclear threat?
As Kroenig and Negrea ironically note, the proclamation that the United States “must work with China on global challenges” is like working with burglars to reduce break-ins.
Kroenig and Negrea support Washington’s deterrence, particularly with regard to the theater forces in the Indo-Pacific, “around Xi. to demonstrate [Jinping] that its aggressive arms expansion will only make China less secure. Seeing his security situation deteriorate might be the only way to persuade Xi to take part in arms control talks. “
Since 1987, the United States has dramatically reduced its nuclear force by well over 90 percent, if you include the nuclear forces destroyed by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) and President George HW Bush’s nuclear initiatives. On the flip side, China has fifteen times its nuclear force and could increase its armed forces fifty times by the end of this decade, which is unprecedented in the entire nuclear age.
China’s rapidly growing missile arsenal brings massive increases in size as well as mission, scope and functionality on China, according to a recent Ministry of Defense (DoD) report.
All of these developments are compounded by China’s aggressive missile testing and modernization programs.
“In 2020 the PLARF [People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force] launched more than 250 ballistic missiles for testing and training purposes. That was more than the rest of the world put together, ”said the DoD 2021 report on military and security developments with the participation of the People’s Republic of China.
Others state that Chinese submarines are rapidly developing new capabilities to protect the continental United States from a catastrophic nuclear attack. China already operates six Jin-class SSBNs, or nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines armed with JL-2 missiles variant.
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