CHINESE NUCLEAR COMMAND, CONTROL, AND COMMUNICATIONS

Peter Wood, Alex Stone, and Thomas Corbett

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INTRODUCTION

The unique arrangement of China’s strategic missile forces (chiefly the SAF/PLARF), wherein conventional and nuclear-armed missiles are deployed side by side in the same base and even on the same launcher, and the ambiguity surrounding its nuclear policy, strategy, and deterrence theory, represent significant barriers to a clear-eyed assessment of China’s nuclear command, control and communications (NC3) arrangements.

Writing in 2012, John Lewis and Xue Litai provided a framework for understanding China’s conceptual approach to nuclear weapons in the form of a six-tier hierarchy of guidance and policies. This framework provided increasing granularity, from high-level grand strategy down to specific guidance for units during a nuclear conflict.1 Tiers 1-4 are directly referenced in China’s defense white papers, albeit in abbreviated form. Tiers 5 and 6 involve more direct discussions about China’s NC3 arrangement, and can be inferred from PLA doctrinal writings, including those reviewed for this study. The secrecy and perhaps intentional ambiguity surrounding tiers 1-4 casts doubt on the trustworthiness of some PLA publications that are often deemed authoritative and restricts the types of analysis that can be performed on the specifics of China’s plans set forth in tiers 5 and 6.

According to the 2006 Defense White Paper, China’s nuclear strategy is subject to the national nuclear policy and military strategy. An anonymized Chinese source also states that the SAF’s strategy falls under national military strategy and that the specific objectives, approaches, and methods of its force building, and employment must be designed in accordance with the overall national military strategy.3 As a result, grasping Tiers 5 and 6, Applied Strategic Principles and Operational Regulations, requires a clear and timely understanding of Tiers 1 through 4. Chinese researchers have raised issues with western scholars who use books like the Science of Second Artillery Campaigns (SSAC 2004) to deduce China’s nuclear strategy.4 According to Wu Riqiang [吴日强], a nuclear and arms control expert at Renmin University in Beijing, China’s senior political leaders formulate nuclear strategy and policy, with the SAF solely responsible for implementation.

While China’s defense white papers outline the contents of Tiers 1 to 4, official descriptions are short, vague, and open to interpretation. Although outside the scope of this study, the uncertainty and confusion over the fundamental pillars of Chinese nuclear thinking risks inadvertent or unintentional escalations with disastrous results. 6 Unfortunately, this approach appears to be largely by design. Some sources claim that successful strategic nuclear deterrence by China takes three forms, one of which is if the enemy cannot predict the PLA’s exact strategic intention and the form of counterstrikes it will carry out, it will not dare to launch a nuclear war.7 The 2013 edition of the PLA Academy of Military Sciences’ Science of Military Strategy (SMS 2013) echoed this approach, stressing that a prudently-crafted nuclear deterrence strategy [核威慑 策略] is important for improving the effectiveness of China’s nuclear deterrence. SMS 2013 offered two principles to follow in the formulation of such a strategy:

This type of “uncertainty as deterrent” tactic permeates the hierarchy. China’s no-first-use pledge (Tier 2) is the most important and widely promulgated element of China’s nuclear policy and forms the starting point for understanding China’s approach to nuclear weapons. However, critical uncertainty surrounds this idea, which Fiona Cunningham and Taylor Fravel examine in detail in their 2015 International Security article assessing China’s nuclear posture in the context of U.S.-China strategic stability.

In their paper, Cunningham and Fravel described how China fosters “limited ambiguity” over its no-first-use (NFU) policy to deter the United States from launching conventional attacks against China’s nuclear forces.9 Western analysts such as Thomas Christenson have described the scenario of U.S. conventional attacks on missiles and related assets being mistakenly viewed by China as an attack on its nuclear retaliatory capability.10 Interlocutors from the Chinese strategic community who were interviewed by Cunningham and Fravel suggested that Beijing has decided on how to respond to a conventional attack on China’s nuclear forces, but has chosen not to make that decision public to both deter through uncertainty, while also preserving the integrity of its NFU policy. To complicate the issue further, the SMS 2013 included references to a potential shift to a launch-on-warning posture, 11 and recent editions of the Department of Defense China Military Power Report indicate that the PLA is in fact moving to launch-on-warning.12 Cunningham and Fravel also note that Chinese concerns about U.S. capabilities, most notably its ballistic missile defense and conventional prompt global strike (CPGS) capability, are likely to further consolidate China’s stance on this issue.

Ambiguity also surrounds China’s nuclear strategy (Tier 3). Officially described as “selfdefense” [自卫防御], Chinese scholars have labeled this strategy in different ways based on their own interpretations, ranging from “first-strike uncertainty” to “counter nuclear coercion,” among others.14 While analysts agree on the rough contour of the strategy, characterized by Cunningham and Fravel in their paper as “assured retaliation,” 15 details about the management, direction, and employment of weapons and forces have not been made clear.

There is also a lack of consensus between Chinese and international scholars regarding China’s nuclear deterrence theory (Tier 4). Lewis and Xue’s analysis highlights the longstanding uneasiness of the Chinese leadership with the western concept of “deterrence,” which was absent from China’s strategic lexicon until the latter half of the 1990s, and did not make its official debut until the 2006 Defense White Paper. 17 Wu Riqiang also underscores China’s hesitation in accepting the western concept of “deterrence,” warning that there is a different set of logic and terminology at work within China’s strategic lexicon. 18 According to Wu, China’s eventual reluctant acceptance of the term “deterrence” into its lexicon inadvertently created further confusion on both sides over essential concepts such as deterrence and coercion.

According to Lewis and Xue’s framework, the deterrence theory is a rough equivalent to the force strategy of the SAF/PLARF that is currently framed as “having both nuclear and conventional capabilities and deterring wars in all battlespaces” [核常兼备、全域慑战]. The term he chang jianbei [核常兼备], which literally means “having both nuclear and conventional,” has been in use since the early 2000s. Consistent with “moderate ambiguity,” this term is inherently vague and can shift its meaning depending on the context. In earlier doctrinal and other PLA reporting (perhaps due to weapons system constraints), the term is used to refer to the existence of both nuclear and conventional weapons on PLARF bases, meaning geographically distinct brigades under the same base with two types of missile systems.

However, the term took on additional shades of meaning when it was used to specifically refer to DF-26-equipped PLARF brigades capable of launching nuclear or conventional warheads. 20 PLARF personnel have more recently been observed training for both nuclear and conventional missions in he chang jianbei brigades, with drills involving conventional precision strikes immediately followed by nuclear counter strikes.

As the current strategic requirement [战略要求] is for the PLARF to “have both nuclear and conventional capabilities and deter wars in all battlespaces,” 22 this configuration may be adopted more widely throughout the force. The Science of Military Strategy 2017 (SMS 2017), published by the PLA National Defense University, also illustrated this trend in stating that “the higher stage of development of he chang jianbei is ‘nuclear-conventional unity’” [核常一体 (he chang yiti)], which refers to the organic integration [有机融合] of nuclear counterstrike capabilities with conventional strike capabilities.

In summary, China’s conceptual approach to nuclear weapons remains ambiguous by design, at least to outsiders, making high-confidence assessment difficult. The point in SMS 2013 on using both consistent and inconsistent messaging to enhance deterrence further complicates the analytical process, casting doubt over the value of PLA doctrinal writings. As Larry Wortzel noted in 2012, the number of “secret” PLA documents, particularly the 2004 Science of Second Artillery Campaigns (SSAC 2004), also raises red flags.24 According to Wortzel:

An alternative explanation to the existence of so many highly classified documents leaking out to the West in so short a time is that the PLA is involved in a major perception management and disinformation campaign. Could what many of us have accepted, this writer included, as established PLA doctrine because of these books be part of a more nuanced effort designed to reinforce the effort in the United States to reduce the size of our nuclear forces and to rethink the scope and deployment of U.S. efforts on ballistic missile defenses?

Consequently, while these publications on the one hand represent the best insights available to analysts in the open-source domain, they should also be regarded with a degree of skepticism and contextualized with additional materials. As will be discussed in later sections, this report attempts to contextualize observations of these materials with observed developments regarding other aspects of Chinese NC3.

China has the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, and according to the DOD is on track to roughly double the size of its stockpile. 25 Moreover, China is making major investments in the size and survivability of its nuclear forces. China’s 2015 Defense White Paper, for example, noted that:

China will optimize its nuclear force structure, improve strategic early warning, command and control, missile penetration, rapid reaction, and survivability and protection, and deter other countries from using or threatening to use nuclear weapons against China.

While the 2000 DOD report to congress on China's military concluded that “China’s C4I infrastructure, including the command automation data network portions, is not capable of controlling or directing military forces in a sophisticated, western-style joint operating environment […],” this is no longer the case for nuclear operations.

Discussion of China's nuclear capability is overwhelmingly skewed toward its nuclear strategy or deployed missile forces. As with many of the other gaps in Chinese military studies, this is as much a function of the lack of sources as of inattention to the topic. As a result, the literature on Chinese nuclear command authority, much less the national command and control system, is very small and largely based on outdated sources.

These difficulties persist, but by using new documents and a combination of untapped sources, including authoritative Chinese teaching and military education publications, along with declassified U.S. intelligence reports and commercially available satellite imagery, this study attempts to bridge the gap in the literature to provide readers with a snapshot of China's evolving nuclear command, control, and communications.