Steve Trimble A discovery of ICBM silos in China has prompted a warning from U.S. Strategic Command about the future balance of nuclear competition.
Steve Trimble
The public revelation this summer that China is building hundreds of silos that may be intended as ICBM launch sites has prompted a fundamental rethink of U.S. nuclear deterrence strategy. Credit: Planet/Middlebury Institute of International Studies
A U.S. military official has warned that China soon will leapfrog Russia as the Defense Department’s top nuclear threat, amplifying a yearlong, rapid reappraisal of Beijing’s capabilities and intentions.
The assessment conducted by Lt. Gen. Thomas Bussiere, deputy commander of U.S. Strategic Command, includes a call to break from classifying threats based solely on the size of a nation’s stockpile of nuclear warheads.
Despite signs of a furious nuclear expansion, China’s assessed stockpile of 200-350 nuclear weapons still remains a distant third behind the size of the U.S. (5,550) and Russian (6,257) warhead inventories.
But Strategic Command believes the numbers disparity masks a strategic drive by China to move beyond the country’s stated “minimum deterrence” posture as quickly as possible.
“China can no longer be considered a lesser-included case, and will soon surpass Russia’s capability and become the leading nuclear threat,” Bussiere said, speaking at a virtual event hosted by the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute.
Asked by Aviation Week to define what he meant by “soon,” Bussiere’s response suggested a timeline well within this decade.
“There will be a crossover point, we believe, in the next few years, Bussiere said.
That crossover moment will not be defined by a number. Unlike the U.S. and Russia, China does not disclose its quantity of nuclear warheads—whether in active or storage status. But Strategic Command’s view of the nuclear threat that China presents is not limited to its volume of warheads.
“We don’t necessarily approach it from a pure numbers game,” Bussiere said. “It is what is operationally fielded: the readiness status of those forces, the posture of those forces and the intent of that posture of those fielded forces. So it’s not just a stockpile number. It’s a much more informed decision.”
The assessment takes into actcount recent public disclosures. Over a monthlong period from late June to late July, two teams of U.S.-based researchers identified 250 new construction sites for intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos at two different locations near China’s northwest border with Mongolia. The sites add to more than 100 ICBM silos already operational in China.
The open-source discoveries enabled by commercial satellite imagery are reshaping public understanding of China’s plans for its nuclear arsenal. The scale of the investment in ICBM launch infrastructure came with little warning.
In September 2020, the Defense Department’s annual China Military Power Report projected that China was expected to field a total of 200 warheads on a small, land-based ICBM force. China’s overall stockpile was projected to roughly double in size over the next decade, but still fall dramatically short of U.S. and Russian capabilities.
Satellite imagery revealed an unannounced Chinese construction site for an intercontinental ballistic missile silo deep in the country’s western desert. Credit: Planet/Middlebury Institute of International Studies
But the military’s understanding of China’s nuclear ambitions appeared to be evolving even as the report was being written. By April 2020, Adm. Charles Richard, commander of Strategic Command, offered a more urgent warning during testimony to the House Armed Services Committee. China’s stockpile was now “well ahead of the pace necessary to double their nuclear stockpile by the end of the decade,” Richard said.
The pace of China’s investments in new nuclear delivery systems is “breathtaking,” Richard added. In 2019 and 2020 alone, China’s People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force fired more than 400 ballistic missiles for test and evaluation purposes, a total larger than the rest of the world combined over the same period, according to U.S. Strategic Command.
The flurry of experiments coincided with the fielding of the road-mobile and silo-based DF-41 ICBM last year, supplementing ongoing deliveries of the DF-31A. Six Jin-class ballistic missile submarines armed with JL-2s pose a sea-based threat. Finally, the Xian H-6N bomber, meanwhile, was shown in 2020 for the first time carrying a nuclear-capable, air-launched ballistic missile, adding an airborne leg to a newly formed nuclear triad.
“The rapid diversification and expansion of Chinese nuclear capabilities—whether those are road-mobile [ICBMs], recently discovered ICBM fields, [or] the multitude of short-, medium- and long-range capabilities that they’re developing—[means] there’s going to be a crossover point where the number of threats presented by China will exceed the number of threats that Russia currently presents,” Bussiere said.
But some experts challenge Strategic Command’s philosophy that posture and intent are at least as important, if not more so, than a simple count of a country’s warhead stockpile.
Despite Bussiere’s beliefs, “size does matter,” says Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, which discovered the first Chinese ICBM silo field in late June.
In Lewis’ view, China’s newly revealed nuclear expansion still falls short of a sea change in the balance of nuclear threats against the U.S.
“My view is that China is probably adding ICBMs to ensure that it has a retaliatory capability that could survive an American attack in large enough numbers to overwhelm the missile defenses in Alaska and California,” Lewis says.
The U.S. still has options even if China maximizes its nuclear capacity over the next several years, Lewis says. Although the U.S. owns a stockpile of 5,550 nuclear warheads, only 1,700 are allowed to be operationally deployed under the New START Treaty with Russia. That gives the U.S. stockpile a hedge of nearly 4,000 warheads, which could be uploaded to deployed status to counter any feasible scenario of Chinese expansion, he adds.
Accepting a set of “heroic assumptions” about China’s ability to rapidly manufacture new warheads, filling each of about 360 silos with a missile carrying six warheads over the next few years would still yield a total stockpile of less than 3,000 warheads, Lewis says.
“Even in this case, the U.S. could upload its ‘hedge,’ and the Chinese would still be short of parity,” Lewis says. “China can’t really overcome that disparity with intent or posture. You’ve either got the bombs or you don’t.”
However, Strategic Command considers the problem to be far more complex. Leadership sees a Chinese nuclear complex aggressively expanding, with no public explanation from Beijing and none of the bilateral tools created in the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union in place to avoid misunderstandings.
“You’ve got to be humble in your ability to predict this [situation],” said Richard, speaking at an event hosted by the Hudson Institute on Aug. 26.
In addition to facing a three-sided nuclear competition in the future, Strategic Command also must consider the possibility that China could extend its arsenal further by coordinating with Russia’s nuclear forces.
“We probably need to go dust off our history and look at it,” Richard said. “There is at least one historic example where the Soviet Union somewhat unexpectedly provided an extended deterrence guarantee to China: in the middle of the 1958 Taiwan crisis.”
The debate over China’s intentions comes amid a Nuclear Posture Review by the administration of President Joe Biden, which is reexamining the $1 trillion nuclear modernization program launched by former President Barack Obama and expanded under former President Donald Trump. The Northrop Grumman Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program, which seeks to replace the Minuteman III missile as the land-based leg of the U.S. nuclear triad, is a potential target of the review, with calls by some Democrats in Congress to defer the acquisition program or eliminate it altogether.
As the U.S. military leadership argues that preserving the nuclear triad is necessary, China’s documented expansion has emerged as a key talking point.
“The actual requirements in the recapitalization of that triad were set in a much more benign strategic environment of five or six years ago, when the threat from Russia was not perceived as what it is today, and China truly was a lesser-included case,” Richard said. “Those conditions have changed dramatically.”
