By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
The Real Motives For China’s Nuclear
Expansion
China is rapidly expanding
its nuclear arsenal. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, Beijing is on track to
amass 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, up from around 200 in 2019, according to
Pentagon estimates. This nuclear buildup, combined with China’s broader
investments in modernizing its armed forces, has caused deep concern in
Washington. In 2023, the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of
the United States insisted that China’s nuclear expansion should
prompt U.S. policymakers to “re-evaluate the size and composition of the U.S.
nuclear force.” In March, Admiral John Aquilino, the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, warned, “we haven’t faced a
threat like this since World War II.”
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As Washington
grapples with the severity of the threat and the risk of nuclear confrontation,
U.S. policymakers must make an effort to better understand the motivation
behind China’s actions. Analysts have been puzzled by China’s sudden shift away
from its traditional policy of maintaining a relatively small nuclear arsenal.
Some in Washington believe China’s buildup is a reaction to U.S. technological
advances; others are concerned that Beijing may have unilaterally adopted a far
more aggressive nuclear strategy.
A close assessment of
the evolving thinking within China’s political leadership and security policy
circles reveals that Chinese officials are not simply expanding their nuclear
arsenal for military-technical purposes. Rather, Chinese leaders seem to have
embraced the untested belief that nuclear weaponry grants them greater
geopolitical leverage to counter perceived threats. Beijing’s objections to
what it sees as an unfair U.S. nuclear strategy and illegitimate U.S. security
interests further solidify its willingness to use unilateral measures to
address its security concerns. Washington must understand how these underlying
perceptions shape Beijing’s nuclear policy if it wants to steer the
U.S.-Chinese relationship in a more prudent direction—or risk responding on the
basis of flawed assumptions, with potentially counterproductive or even
catastrophic results.
Peace Through Strength?
In Beijing’s view,
growing tensions with Washington are the result of the shifting balance of
power between China and the United States—a consequence of China’s rapid
economic development rather than any change in behavior on its part. Washington
feels threatened by China’s rise and has become increasingly hostile to
Beijing, the thinking goes, and has developed containment strategies aimed at
preserving U.S. geopolitical dominance. Given these circumstances, Beijing must
persuade Washington to accept China’s ascendance as a major player and convince
U.S. policymakers that they will be unable to contain, disrupt, or destabilize
China. Beijing can do so only, according to China’s ruling elites, by
bolstering its power.
This reasoning has
led China to perceive a mounting threat from the United States as the gap in
power between the two countries has narrowed. A staunch advocate of the notion
that the United States is hostile to China’s rise, Xi assigns great geopolitical
significance to nuclear weapons as a means of showcasing Chinese power. His
predecessors, influenced by China’s traditionally modest nuclear philosophy and
with more limited resources at their disposal, exercised significant restraint
in developing China’s nuclear capabilities and prioritized qualitative
improvements over quantitative expansion. Xi, on the other hand, has elevated
the missile force to the status of a full military service, issued specific
instructions to expedite nuclear modernization, and boosted both the
sophistication and the size of China’s nuclear arsenal.
Xi’s commitment to
nuclear weapons reflects a profound difference in how he perceives such arms as
compared with his American counterparts. Rather than aiming to achieve clearly
defined military objectives, such as deterring an enemy from undertaking specific
military activities, Beijing sees nuclear weapons as symbols of military
strength and believes that they wield a particular influence on an adversary’s
perception of the power balance. This notion underpins what Chinese officials
refer to as the “strategic counterbalance” mission of their nuclear forces—a
bid to force the United States to take a more accommodating stance toward
China.
Xi has long believed
in the merits of strategic counterbalancing through nuclear weapons. Shortly
after coming to power in 2012, he commented that Russia had made the right
decision to prioritize the development of its nuclear capabilities even as the
country’s economy was in decline. Moscow’s move was in line with Xi’s view that
the strength of a country’s nuclear arsenal shapes an adversary’s overall
approach toward the bilateral relationship. In early 2021, amid internal
warnings that a U.S.-led global anti-China campaign following the COVID-19
outbreak could pose the greatest perceived challenge to Beijing’s state and
regime security in decades, Xi called on the military to further speed up
China’s nuclear expansion. This emphasis on nuclear weapons as a form of
general leverage has taken hold among Chinese strategists, especially given
rising tensions with the United States. As Beijing demands better treatment by
Washington and rejects any dialogue that would take place from a position of
U.S. superiority, Chinese public opinion leaders have contended
that a larger nuclear arsenal would force Washington to genuinely respect
Beijing and tread more cautiously.
The notion that
nuclear weapons possess extensive—almost magical—coercive power in and beyond
the military realm is probably more a product of intuition than of rigorously
examined logic and evidence. After all, Moscow’s formidable nuclear power
during the Cold War did not deter Washington from seeking to undermine the
Soviet Union through economic subversion and political warfare. Nonetheless,
the highly centralized domestic power structure that Xi has established has
prevented any serious evaluation of his guiding assumptions, leading instead to
the rapid and unquestioning execution of his vision of China as a more robust
nuclear power. The government’s suppression of what it has labeled “baseless
criticisms of the Party’s decisions” and the secrecy with which it veils its
planning mechanisms and activities make it hard for the Chinese expert
community to assess and debate nuclear development, much less weigh in on
future policy. The official military doctrine contains increasingly incoherent
elements, such as the nuclear forces’ emphasis on “war preparation” and
“winning strategic victories” alongside a persistent opposition to warfighting,
suggesting that nuclear policymaking is a top-down process driven more by a
nebulous political mandate than by distinct military necessity and robust
methodology. The lack of well-defined and thoroughly examined military
objectives impairs China’s ability to publicly explain its policy—or to
formulate clear positions on the circumstances under which it would be prepared
to negotiate nuclear limitations with the United States.
Foul Is Fair
A key obstacle to
nuclear dialogue is China’s growing skepticism that cooperative security
measures could defend it from the existential threat that it perceives is
coming from the United States. Xi, for instance, has stressed the
importance of “keeping the strategic initiative to safeguard national security
firmly in our own hands.” This distrust is driving Beijing further toward
achieving a more advantageous balance of power and diminishes its interest in
nuclear restraint, let alone arms control talks.
Beijing’s pessimism
partly stems from perceived U.S. double standards in the nuclear realm. Chinese
experts point to the fact that the U.S. government does not accept that China
has the right to adopt the same nuclear strategies as those used by the United
States. Washington, for instance, maintains the option for the first use of
nuclear weapons but raises concerns over China potentially deviating from its
unconditional pledge to not use nuclear weapons first—a commitment that China
says it will not break.
U.S. decision-makers
explain away these double standards by hinting that American security
objectives are more legitimate than China’s. They consider the U.S. goal of
upholding the territorial status quo in the Asia-Pacific, including in the
Taiwan Strait and the East China and South China Seas, as aligned with
international laws and norms, and they contrast their regional aims with
Chinese efforts to change the territorial status quo through coercive means.
Therefore, U.S. policymakers deem it both morally defensible and strategically
necessary to preserve a broad range of nuclear options for the United States
and its allies.
Beijing, however,
attributes these double standards to what Chinese officials describe as the
United States’ “hegemonic arrogance.” In particular, China sees the U.S. claim
of the right to defend Taiwan, a territory Beijing has identified as “the core
of its core interests,” as illegitimate, especially when Washington frames it
in terms of its own security needs. American strategists often highlight
Taiwan’s significance and argue that keeping Taiwan separate from China is
critically important to U.S. national security interests, which include
maintaining a favorable military balance in the Asia-Pacific, defending U.S.
allies in the region, preserving U.S. global credibility, and advancing
geo-economic competition with China. These announced goals give further
credence to Beijing’s concern that U.S. geopolitical gains will come at the
expense of China’s territorial integrity. And they erode the moral basis of the
U.S. opposition to China’s military agenda and strengthen Beijing’s conviction
that it must challenge what it views as American hegemony.
China believes it can
rectify this unjust imbalance by more ambitiously showcasing its power,
including by expanding its nuclear arsenal. Chinese experts argue, for
instance, that the Soviet Union succeeded in altering U.S. nuclear strategy
during the Cold War. By significantly enhancing its nuclear capabilities during
the 1960s and 1970s, Moscow managed to pressure Washington into abandoning its
policy of massive retaliation, which threatened a large-scale nuclear strike in
response to any act of Soviet aggression, in favor of the more restrained
strategy of flexible response, which made the level and scale of U.S. nuclear
responses commensurate with the severity of the Soviet aggression. They are
also quick to point out that Washington did not correspondingly adjust its
policies toward weaker adversaries, such as China, but instead maintained
expansive strike plans against them. Now that China has significantly more
resources than it did during the Cold War, Beijing seeks to redress what it
perceives as an ongoing injustice.
This resistance
underscores a broader theme in the U.S.-Chinese rivalry: beyond divergences
over specific security objectives, China increasingly demands fair rules and
equal standards of conduct as an end in and of itself. Chinese officials have
also emphasized the importance of fairness as an essential condition for
engaging in discussions on security and arms control matters. This motive
suggests that China is likely to continue focusing on unilateral capability
development, rather than cooperative measures, to establish what it considers a
more just and equitable nuclear relationship with the United States.
The Underlying Challenges
These nontechnical
factors introduce obstacles to nuclear dialogue that are complex and poorly
understood by observers outside China. American analysts and others in the West
continue to narrowly fixate on the military-technical factors that have shaped China’s
nuclear strategy in the past to explain the country’s current nuclear
expansion. To be sure, Chinese strategists have expressed concerns for decades
that U.S. homeland missile defenses, conventional precision strike weapons, and
other nonnuclear technologies would make it more difficult for China to
retaliate if it endured a nuclear first strike. However the United States has
not significantly expanded its nuclear forces, conventional missile stockpiles,
or homeland missile defense systems in recent years, suggesting that additional
factors lie behind Xi’s decision to embrace nuclear expansion.
Most foreign analysts
and policymakers fail to appreciate the extent to which China’s nuclear
expansion is motivated by ambiguous political reasoning and muddled thinking
and instead interpret it as being driven by an offensive military strategy.
Drawing on worst-case nuclear warfighting scenarios, including a possible
coordinated preemptive nuclear strike by China and Russia against the United
States, many experts argue that the United States must build up its nuclear
forces and defenses. These experts, aiming to strengthen U.S. deterrence for
understandable reasons, overlook the possibility that their arguments might
actually undermine U.S. security by giving further credence to the hawkish view
in Beijing that Washington is intentionally overstating the threat posed by
China to justify its pursuit of absolute nuclear superiority.
The situation is made
worse by the growing chasm between Chinese and American societies. The widening
gap in worldviews and political perceptions between China and the West,
facilitated in large part by China’s control of information and public opinion,
is a major obstacle in the way of mutual understanding and trust. As a result,
both sides have little faith that cooperative approaches will ensure future
security. Beijing is hoping it can skirt the issue with the help of a larger
nuclear stockpile. Aided by an expanded arsenal, China believes it can force
Washington to overlook the fundamental differences between them, including
escalating disputes over facts, norms, and values, and simply compel the United
States to accept China as it is, respecting China’s core interests as defined
by Beijing. If China stays this course, however, it will end up in an
intensifying nuclear rivalry with the United States.
Bridging The Perception Gap
The current U.S.
approach to China’s nuclear program is ineffective. Proposals made by American
analysts for de-escalating the arms race typically call for mutual restraint at
the military-technical level through measures that enhance nuclear transparency
or limit new strategic weapons. But these suggestions do not directly tackle
the underlying concerns and grievances that drive China’s nuclear buildup, and
unsurprisingly they have failed to interest Xi. Ultimately, stabilizing the
nascent U.S.-Chinese nuclear arms race requires that Beijing and Washington
engage in direct discussions on the key security issues that fuel their mutual
hostility.
Such a dialogue
aligns fully with both U.S. and Chinese objectives. The so-called rules-based
international order championed by Washington relies on a mutual recognition of
what constitutes legitimate interests and the acceptable means to pursue them.
Meanwhile, in high-level government statements and recent documents, Chinese
officials have repeatedly emphasized the importance of “taking into account the
legitimate security interests of other countries” and ensuring “undiminished
security for all countries.” The overlap in the two countries’ positions
creates an opportunity for a thorough discussion to define legitimate security
interests and the acceptable means to achieve them. It would also mirror the
process leading up to the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which effectively reduced
tensions between the Soviet and Western blocs during the Cold War.
As an initial step,
China and the United States could commit to not change the territorial status
quo in the Asia-Pacific through military means. Such an agreement, or
reciprocal unilateral declarations to the same end, would greatly bolster the
credibility of China’s claims to be rising peacefully, help set fair and
equitable rules of conduct, foster a shared vision for regional stability, and
reduce all involved parties’ motivations for a military buildup.
Admittedly, given
China’s ongoing reluctance to enter meaningful discussions on both nuclear and
broader security issues, there is no guarantee that Beijing would immediately
welcome a U.S. proposal for talks. Even if a dialogue were to begin—potentially
prompted by international appeal and pressure—it would still require adept
diplomacy to steer both parties through what would likely be challenging
conversations. Nonetheless, a dialogue-based approach aimed at better
understanding each other’s views on what comprises legitimate security
interests and approaches would address Beijing’s core concerns and offer the
prospect of stabilizing the U.S.-Chinese security relationship. By prioritizing
this discussion, Washington could demonstrate its goodwill—and help Beijing
recognize that only cooperative measures will soften a U.S. policy of
deterrence.
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