While the invasion of Ukraine has raised tensions in Europe, strategic competition between the United States and China is escalating in the Pacific.
Conversations about U.S.-China competition are often centered on the balance of the conventional forces in the Western Pacific and whether or not the U.S. could defend Taiwan from attack. Less attention has been paid to the dangerous implications of Chinese strategic nuclear expansion, which poses a serious long-term threat to America’s ability to deter Communist China’s aggression. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated how difficult it is to protect allies when our rivals can shield their conventional warfare behind the threat of nuclear force. To avoid the mistakes made with Russia, American leaders must adopt a strong response to Chinese nuclear expansion. They must renew their commitment to modernizing the American strategic nuclear arsenal and expand missile and missile defense cooperation with partners in the Western Pacific. Further, U.S. officials must attempt to engage China in arms control dialogue to limit its nuclear and missile forces.
China’s nuclear arsenal is expanding rapidly, so time is of the essence. Since its first nuclear test in 1964, China has maintained a relatively small arsenal of nuclear weapons when compared to American and Russian forces. That track record of nuclear restraint is over. China is building new missiles by the hundreds, along with new submarines and bombers to carry them. At the same time, the American and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals remain limited by the New START Treaty, which allows each party to deploy, at most, 700 launchers and 1,550 nuclear warheads. How far China’s nuclear buildup will go remains uncertain, but it is quite possible that China could have as many as 1,000 nuclear warheads by the end of the decade. That would see Beijing rival the size of the American and Russian arsenals for the first time ever.
This expansion of Chinese nuclear forces reflects Chinese President Xi Jinping’s growing ambitions. China’s traditional, smaller nuclear arsenal was appropriate for deterring its neighbors from unprovoked aggression. Many other nuclear powers, including Britain, France, India, Israel, and Pakistan, have maintained similar arsenals as a last resort against attack. Historically, only two countries built nuclear arsenals of the scale that China is now pursuing: the U.S. and Russia. Dating back to the Cold War, these large nuclear forces reflected the dueling geopolitical ambitions of the superpowers to exercise global leadership. The Chinese Communist Party’s decision to expand its nuclear arsenal thus reflects the expansive geopolitical ambitions of Xi and the increasing incompatibility of those ambitions with the American-led democratic international order.
The expansion of Chinese nuclear forces poses a significant threat to American national security. Our current strategy to contain Chinese ambitions depends heavily on partnerships with many of China’s neighbors, including Australia, India, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. When acting together, this combination confronts China with an overwhelming preponderance of economic, technological, and military power. Yet China’s growing nuclear arsenal calls into question the credibility of U.S. security commitments. Would Washington really risk the nuclear devastation of the American homeland to fight alongside our partners in Asia? Faced with a rapidly growing Chinese arsenal, our security partners might choose to appease China rather than rely on American guarantees. Perhaps even more troubling, if Chinese leaders doubt the credibility of American security guarantees, they might attack an American partner, the very circumstances that might produce a U.S.-China war.
Washington must thus take immediate action to counter China’s nuclear expansion.
First, American leaders must continue to modernize U.S. nuclear forces, including long-range missiles and the platforms to launch them. Second, the U.S. must ensure that it retains the technical wherewithal for long-term nuclear competition, repairing its national nuclear infrastructure to allow the future maintenance and, if necessary, expansion of the nuclear arsenal. Third, the U.S. should deepen security cooperation with partners in Asia, especially in the development of intermediate-range missiles, to introduce new threat vectors to the Chinese homeland. Finally, the U.S. should leverage its military and diplomatic measures to limit Chinese nuclear expansion through arms control negotiations. American negotiators should explore a wide range of potential limits with their Chinese counterparts, including dismantling China’s large intermediate-range missile force, limiting the size and improving the transparency of its strategic missile forces, and cutting off fissile material production to limit its capacity for building new warheads.
In addition to the leverage derived from America’s own force modernization, Chinese leaders should be reminded explicitly and often that their neighbors will not sit idle while China rewrites Asia’s nuclear balance. Faced with a rapidly growing nuclear threat, Japan and South Korea could very well decide to pursue their own nuclear weapons, while India and Pakistan would likely expand theirs. Chinese actions are thus inherently self-defeating.
The combination of American force modernization, closer security cooperation with partners, and hard-headed arms control offers the best opportunity to head off the threat of a large Chinese nuclear arsenal. If, faced with these developments, Chinese leaders come to their senses and agree to limits on their nuclear expansion, then the threat can be reduced and American security guarantees reinforced. If they refuse to limit their nuclear expansion, then modernized forces and closer partnerships will provide the best chance to deter Chinese aggression in the decades to come.
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John D. Maurer is a professor at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at Air University and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His book Competitive Arms Control was recently published by Yale University Press. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
