By Toshi Yoshihara & Jack Bianchi
Introduction
A diverse range of external stimuli, including technological trends and geopolitical shifts, is leading the strategic community of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to reconsider existing nuclear policy, strategy, and operations. According to Chinese open sources, U.S. global conventional precision strike systems, U.S. missile defenses, and India’s nuclear weapons modernization, among other threats, could shake the PRC’s faith in longstanding nuclear doctrine and posture. The 2013 Science of Military Strategyconfirms that “the nuclear security circumstances facing China in overall terms are trending toward complexity.” [1] In response to such challenges, some Chinese analysts have proposed loosening the no-first-use policy and undertaking quantitative and qualitative improvements to China’s nuclear forces.
A departure from enduring nuclear policy and strategy may also reflect China’s growing power and sense of purpose as it seeks to reshape its surroundings and accelerate the erosion of the U.S. position in the Western Pacific. Indeed, Chinese analysts are exploring Cold War history in Europe, from which they may be drawing lessons about the vulnerabilities of U.S. extended deterrence in Asia. While it remains unclear how and to what extent Chinese nuclear strategy will advance Beijing’s expanding ambitions, the internal debates suggest that China may be increasingly inclined to adopt a more coercive nuclear strategy. [2]
U.S. Conventional Prompt Global Strike
A major external driver that has shaped Chinese discourse is the pace and scale of technological change and innovation by the world’s leading military power, the United States. Chinese analysts have expressed concerns about the U.S. development of prompt global strike—a family of strike systems designed to quickly and precisely deliver conventional firepower over long ranges—for at least a decade. [3] As the National Defense University’s 2015 Science of Military Strategyforecasts, “Equipping conventional strategic missiles with prompt global precision-strike capabilities will become an important constituent of the strategic missile forces of major military powers.” [4] Such missiles would enable the U.S. military to rapidly destroy mobile, hardened, or deeply-buried targets, including enemy ballistic missiles, ground-based radars and sensors, anti-satellite missiles, mobile missile launchers, ships at pier-side, and parked aircraft. [5]
The most worrisome danger is that prompt global strike weaponry, including hypersonic systems, would furnish the United States the conventional means to conduct a disarming first strike against Chinese nuclear forces. The 2013 Science of Military Strategy warns, “Once the [prompt global strike] program becomes an actual combat capability to be used conventionally to strike our nuclear missile forces, it would place us in a reactive position, greatly influence our nuclear counterstrike capabilities, and weaken the effectiveness of our nuclear deterrence.” [6]
To deter a conventional strike against China’s nuclear forces and to mitigate the risks of such a strike, Chinese analysts have called for expanding China’s nuclear arsenal; [7] enhancing the survivability of its retaliatory forces; embarking on its own prompt global strike development; loosening the constraints of the no first use policy; [8] and even adopting a warfighting nuclear strategy. [9] All of these choices would clearly have implications for the size, composition, and readiness of current nuclear forces.
U.S. Missile Defense Systems
Chinese analysts have also voiced alarm about U.S. advances in missile defense since at least the late 1980s. Their objections reached fever pitch when the U.S. military deployed the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) System on South Korean soil in mid-2017. Chinese observers believe THAAD’s X-band AN/TPY-2 long-range, high-altitude radar system can peer deep into China’s interior from the Korean Peninsula and potentially monitor Chinese ballistic missile launches fired from locations in North China [10] or beneath the waves of China’s offshore waters. [11] Moreover, the forward positions of these sensors would enable them to track the critical stage of a missile’s flight when it releases its warheads and decoys, [12] thereby undermining the penetration capabilities of Chinese nuclear forces—and more importantly, the credibility of China’s second-strike deterrent. [13]
In response to the operational and strategic advantages that THAAD purportedly confers to the United States, Chinese commentators have called for responses similar to those designed to counter U.S. prompt global strike systems. One Chinese scholar urges the PLA to field “a certain numerical scale” of the DF-41 inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) armed with multiple warheads, modernize China’s nuclear triad, and build up the size and striking power of its undersea nuclear forces. [14] Others have pressed for the development of hypersonic delivery vehicles to defeat U.S. missile defense systems. [15] Still others have hinted at a broader reconsideration of China’s no first use policy, in addition to increasing the size and penetration capabilities of the existing ICBM force. [16]
India’s Modernizing Nuclear Deterrent
The PRC confronts an increasingly complex geometry of deterrence in the second nuclear age due to nuclear proliferation among rising regional powers. Chinese analysts cite India’s emergence as a nuclear power as a prospective dilemma for Beijing. New Delhi’s entry into the nuclear club opened up a new front along China’s southern flank. [17] Moreover, India sees China, rather than Pakistan, as its primary threat and has designed its deterrent posture accordingly. [18]One Chinese study observes that the capabilities of India’s long-range strategic missiles, particularly the Agni IRBM and ICBM series, far exceed the requirements of a contingency involving Pakistan and are clearly directed at China. [19] These missiles would allow India to hold at risk China’s major political, economic, and industrial centers, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.
To what extent India’s deterrent posture will influence Chinese nuclear force modernization remains uncertain, not least because of sharp asymmetries in threat perceptions between the two antagonists. Indian strategists tend to overinflate the Chinese danger while their counterparts in China are inclined to hold a sanguine, if not condescending, attitude toward their southern neighbor. Nevertheless, given India’s strategic depth, large numbers of population and industrial centers, increasingly competitive economic and technological base, and growing nuclear arsenal that the Chinese acknowledge is directed at them, Beijing will almost certainly adapt its nuclear posture in accord with developments in South Asia.
Chinese Research on U.S. Extended Deterrence
Recent Chinese interest in studying extended deterrence (yanshen weishe, 延伸威慑) suggests that analysts are paying more attention to U.S. security guarantees in the region. Chinese analysts do not directly address Beijing’s official views concerning U.S. extended deterrence; rather, they have explored Cold War history, the evolution of U.S.-NATO relations, and U.S. regional strategy. Chinese analysts have looked to the past for lessons. For example, an in-depth history of U.S. nuclear strategy in the early 1970s—written in support of a larger Chinese government-sponsored research effort on U.S. deployment of nuclear weapons in the Far East during the Cold War—examines the influence of the “Schlesinger Doctrine.” The author attributes the U.S. shift toward a limited nuclear option in part to deepening American concerns that extended deterrence to European allies under existing policies lacked credibility. [20]
Chinese commentators have explored the transatlantic debates following the Soviet introduction of SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles in the late 1970s, noting the danger of decoupling that animated Western fears at the time. [21] Decoupling was premised on the idea that an exclusive nuclear threat against Europe might disincline the United States—whose territory would be spared from the Soviet theater missiles—to intervene and retaliate on behalf of its allies across the Atlantic.
Scholars have also assessed the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Europe since the end of the Cold War. [22] Still others have sought to measure the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence. [23] Notably, Sun Xun and Han Lue find that U.S. credibility is strongest in Europe when compared against American extended deterrence in Asia and the Middle East, owing to the forward presence of non-strategic nuclear weapons and formal institutional mechanisms that involve U.S. allies in decisions over the employment of nuclear weapons. Analysts have even applied game theory to examine three-way interactions between a defender, a challenger, and the challenger’s third-party security guarantor—which has obvious analogies to China’s present security environment. [24]
These Chinese writings implicitly illustrate the growing gap between U.S. commitments and resources in the context of extended deterrence. The literature frequently recounts the sharp reductions in U.S. forward-deployed nuclear forces during the post-Cold War period, including deep cuts in Europe, the unilateral withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons, including those in South Korea, in 1991, and the decision to retire nuclear-armed Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles in 2010. Chinese analysts also highlight the contentious debates about the declining utility of nuclear weapons that have sown division within the United States and among its allies since the 1990s drawdown. Yet, as the Chinese point out, regional aggression and proliferation over the past decade have made deterrence and reassurance ever more urgent and problematic.[25]
Chinese open sources to date are silent on how Beijing might exploit the dilemmas of U.S. extended deterrence, but they demonstrate a keen recognition that Cold War-era concerns may become ever more relevant as China’s own theater-range capabilities grow in size and capability. Since China may be seeking to undermine extended deterrence in Asia and perhaps use decoupling as the tool with which to break the chains of the U.S. alliance structure, Beijing’s views of extended deterrence may be an area worthy of closer attention in the coming years
Conclusions: Leaning Toward Change
The degree to which China’s nuclear policy and strategy will stay the course or depart from established practices rests on a complex mix of external and internal sources of competition. Trends in the security environment, including technological breakthroughs by leading military powers, can impel change and encourage decision-makers to test the limits of their self-imposed constraints. Strong evidence exists that advocates for nuclear modernization have seized on such external developments to justify their own agendas, highlighting the interplay between external events and domestic actors that could spur a reassessment of existing procedures and thinking.
Indeed, while worries about U.S. and Indian intentions and capabilities expressed in the literature are undoubtedly real, other institutional, bureaucratic, and elite motivations less visible to outside observers may also be at work. For example, Chinese leaders may be more inclined to adopt changes in nuclear strategy in order to shape the external environment in ways that better reflect Beijing’s perceived newfound status and that accommodate China’s growing power and ambitions. The combined full weight of these domestic and external factors strongly indicates that the decades-old limits that have characterized Chinese nuclear thinking are likely to give way to a more proactive nuclear policy and strategy with a more flexible posture and capability.
This article has been adapted in part from a case study performed by the authors in the report “Understanding Strategic Interaction in the Second Nuclear Age” (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2019). The full report is available at this link.
Toshi Yoshihara is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and he previously held the John A. van Beuren Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies at the U.S. Naval War College where he taught strategy for over a decade. Dr. Yoshihara has served as a visiting professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California, San Diego and the U.S. Air War College. His latest book, with James R. Holmes, is the second edition of Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy (Naval Institute Press, 2019).
Jack Bianchi is a Senior Analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and focuses on security strategy and defense issues in the Asia-Pacific region. Mr. Bianchi was previously a Research Analyst at Defense Group Inc. where he performed bilingual (Chinese and English) open source research and analysis for U.S. government clients on Chinese cybersecurity issues and China’s defense-related science and technology development. Mr. Bianchi’s prior experience also includes work at the Department of Justice and in the Office of Investment Security at the Department of the Treasury.
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