China’s plan to be the next nuclear superpower

Beijing’s nuclear strategy has long been surprisingly modest. So why did it just double its nuclear arsenal?

There are currently nine nuclear powers in the world, but arguably only two nuclear superpowers. The United States and Russia account for around 90 percent of the global nuclear arsenal, with around 4,000 warheads each in their military stockpiles.

There may soon be a third.

A Pentagon report on Chinese military power released at the end of November estimated that China’s nuclear arsenal has now exceeded 400 operational warheads, double the estimate from just two years ago. At current rates of construction, the report suggested, the Chinese nuclear stockpile could reach 1,500 warheads by 2035.

This doesn’t mean China will definitely build these weapons. “No one actually knows that answer,” said Tong Zhao, a nuclear analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “China is taking a step-by-step approach in response to the strategic environment.”

What is clear is that as China seeks to boost its influence and stature on the global stage, it is now pouring resources into its nuclear program and thinking about a new nuclear strategy. And Washington won’t be the only world capital raising alarm about the implications.

A nuclear late bloomer

China joined the nuclear club in 1964, when it tested an atomic bomb at Lop Nur, a dried lake in Xinjiang, in western China. At the time, the prospect of such a destructive weapon in the hands of Mao Zedong’s communist regime prompted a level of American alarm comparable to the response to North Korea’s nuclear program in recent years. Several years before the Lop Nur test, President John F. Kennedy had suggested that the Chinese would be less likely than Russians or Americans to avoid a nuclear war because of the “lower value they attach to human life.”

But if anything, China’s nuclear ambitions since then have been more cautious and restrained than its rivals. While the U.S. and Soviet Union grew their nuclear arsenals at a breakneck pace during the Cold War, China maintained a small, “lean and effective” force, which tended to grow more slowly than the estimates of Western experts. It was only about two years ago that China’s nuclear arsenal overtook France’s to become the world’s third largest.

China was also much slower than other nuclear powers to build intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). And it remains the only nuclear power that publicly maintains an unconditional “no first use” policy” regarding nuclear weapons.

Lately, however, along with an overall military expansion and modernization, China has been stepping up its nuclear ambitions. In 2016, China elevated what is now known as the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF), which controls China’s land-based missile arsenal, to the status of fourth service branch, alongside the army, navy and air force — a signal of the growing prioritization of the country’s nuclear deterrent.

In 2021, satellite imagery revealed what experts believed to be more than 100 new silos for ICBMs in the desert near the northwestern city of Yumen. It’s widely thought that some of these may be decoys — a revival of America’s Cold War-era “shell game” strategy, in which a large number of silos were left empty in order to confuse and sap the resources of an adversary in the event of an exchange of nuclear missiles.

Also last year, China tested a new hypersonic missile that circled the world before cruising toward its target, and featured a design meant to confound missile defense systems. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the test as very close to a breakthrough “sputnik moment” for China.

The recent Pentagon report also notes that China is “investing in and expanding the number of its land-, sea- and air-based nuclear delivery platforms.” This includes a bomber capable of firing a nuclear-capable, air-launched ballistic missile and a new class of operational submarine-launched ballistic missiles that “represent the PRC’s first credible sea-based nuclear deterrent.”

The strategy

So what exactly would 1,500 nuclear warheads do for China that its current arsenal can’t? The answer may have to do with what nuclear strategists call a “survivable second strike.”

“They went from 200 to 400 warheads in the last year or so, but we have 10 times that,” said Raymon Kuo, an expert on Chinese strategy at the Rand Corporation. “So, if there were a U.S. nuclear first strike, there’s a possibility that we could just wipe out all of their nuclear weapons at one go.” A larger, more dispersed arsenal gives China a greater chance of surviving a U.S. first strike with the ability to fire back. Kuo said China’s thinking is informed by its reading of American strategic doctrine in the Indo-Pacific which, at least in Beijing’s view, merges conventional capabilities, new capabilities like cyberwarfare, and nuclear weapons in a way that makes it more likely that a conventional conflict would go nuclear.

Meanwhile, even if nuclear war never comes, these weapons also serve a political purpose for Xi Jinping’s government.

“First and foremost, the thing that’s motivating China’s buildup is its changing domestic situation,” Jeffrey Lewis, a professor and nuclear analyst at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told Grid. “It’s not that China’s security situation got a lot worse. China’s richer and stronger than it’s ever been in the past. You have a Chinese government that has a different view of things. They are coming to talk about nuclear weapons in much the way that we and the Russians do.”

In other words, China sees itself as a global superpower now. And while in the past China viewed a relatively minimal nuclear deterrent as sufficient for its defense, now it sees nuclear weapons as a tool to help accomplish its global ambitions. Several experts suggested China may also be taking lessons from how Russia has used the implied threat of nuclear weapons use to limit the type and amount of military assistance that Western countries have provided to Ukraine.

“You don’t even have to threaten nuclear use,” said Zhao. “You can do things like hold nuclear exercises or make reference to your capabilities. Those things can create concern in China’s enemies about the risk of escalation and that could deliver some core benefits.”

Lewis suggested that this type of intimidation is only possible with a large arsenal. “If you have 1,500 instead of 300 [warheads], you can engage in the kind of signaling that Vladimir Putin has engaged in Ukraine,” he said.

And of course, this signaling comes amid rising military and political tensions between China and the United States, and growing speculation about a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan — a conflict that many experts fear could end up involving the use of nuclear weapons.

For what it’s worth, after a recent meeting between Biden and Xi in Bali, Indonesia, in which Putin’s potential nuclear use in Ukraine was discussed, the White House issued a statement saying that the two leaders agreed that a “nuclear war should never be fought and can never be won.”

How real is ‘no first use’?

China rejects the notion that there’s anything aggressive about its nuclear buildup — echoing its response to suggestions that its regional ambitions are aggressive in any way.

In a statement responding to the recent Pentagon report, defense ministry spokesman Tan Kefei accused the U.S. of being the main military aggressor in the world and said, “What needs to be emphasized is that China firmly pursues the nuclear strategy of self-defense and defense, always adheres to the policy of no first use of nuclear weapons at any time and under any circumstances, and maintains its nuclear force at the minimum level required for national security.”

U.S. officials have often treated the Chinese no-first-use policy with incredulity. Adm. Charles Richard, chief of U.S. Strategic Command, testified to the Senate in 2020 that he could “drive a truck through that no-first-use policy,” suggesting it was vague enough that China would be able to find pretexts to ignore it.

Most experts aren’t quite so cavalier, but others have doubts about how strongly such a policy would hold up a in a crisis. Zhao said that his reading of Chinese military planning documents suggests that “at least at the military level, the Chinese missile force is ready to lower the nuclear threshold during a crisis if necessary.” This doesn’t mean they actually have lowered the threshold, but that they may be readying for a scenario in which political leaders would decide that was necessary.

“I don’t think they’re lying when they say, ‘No, we really will not use nukes first,’” Kuo added. “But when things go really badly, how much is that policy really worth? I don’t think there are really institutional checks. If Xi Jinping says ‘go,’ they’re still going to launch.”

Hope for diplomacy?

The U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals may still dwarf China’s, but on the other hand, we at least know a good deal about them. Thanks to a series of arms control treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union — and after that, with Russia — there are limits on the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads that both sides possess and provisions to verify those numbers. The most recent of these agreements, the New START treaty, was signed in 2010 and extended for another five years in 2021: it was one of the last diplomatic breakthroughs between the U.S. and Russia before the invasion of Ukraine.

China’s nuclear program is not subject to any comparable agreement. The Trump administration, which let several major arms control agreements with Russia lapse (the argument was that the deals would allow China’s nuclear forces to grow unchecked while America’s were limited), had pushed for trilateral nuclear arms talks among the U.S., Russia, and China — an idea that Beijing rejected. The Biden administration has moved away from the trilateral approach, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken has suggested that something comparable to New START could be negotiated between the U.S. and China. U.S. officials say China also has expressed little interest in this idea. China’s embassy in Washington did not respond to Grid’s request for comment on the feasibility of nuclear diplomacy.

Kuo says the radio silence from Beijing shouldn’t be surprising. He summarized the Chinese view: “We’ve got 400 warheads. You’ve got 3,800. If anyone needs ‘New START’, it’s you guys.”

A new nuclear world

Arms control involving two nuclear superpowers is hard enough. Case in point: The U.S. accused Russia last week of expanding and modernizing its nuclear arsenal, just as Putin has discussed formally adding first use of nuclear weapons to his country’s military doctrine. The U.S., for its part, is set to spend about $2 trillion on nuclear weapons over the next 25 years. Talks on extending New START past 2026 have stalled amid tensions over Ukraine. We’re a long way from the dramatic 2009 speech in which Barack Obama promised “concrete steps” toward a world without nuclear weapons. And the situation may be about to get much harder and more complicated.

In physics, a “three-body problem” refers to the confoundingly difficult task of calculating the movements of three, rather than two, objects reacting to each other’s gravity. (It’s also the title of an apocalyptic Chinese sci-fi novel that became an unexpected global sensation several years ago.) The addition of a third nuclear superpower could have a similar destabilizing effect on the already unstable world of nuclear brinkmanship.

Arms races happen because one country builds and modernizes its arsenal to improve its defensive deterrent, and the other side considers that an act of aggression, and feels the need to respond in kind. Concerted diplomacy can sometimes break the cycle of escalation, but, said Lewis, “at three, it just becomes insoluble. The U.S. will have to do things to respond to the Chinese, and that in turn will make the Russians feel more insecure. It’s just exponentially harder to get three countries to agree to something.” The Trump administration’s unwillingness to engage in arms control negotiations with Russia under the pretext that it would embolden China was an illustration of this dynamic.

On top of this, in several countries in East Asia, including South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, faith in the ability of America’s military capabilities to deter Chinese expansionism is wavering and, at least in some quarters, there are calls for these nations to develop their own nuclear deterrents.

The world has managed to avoid nuclear catastrophe since 1945 — though not without a number of close calls — even as the number of states with their own atomic weapons has grown. But nuclear expansion in one country tends to encourage them in other countries, and the task of preventing anyone from actually using one of these weapons is only getting trickier. China is unlikely to be welcomed to the nuclear superpower club with open arms.

Thanks to Dave Tepps for copy editing this article.

Joshua Keating

China’s plan to be the next nuclear superpower