Some analysts suggest China’s vast network of underground tunnels is evidence it is undertaking a massive build-up of its nuclear arsenal. Actually, China has reason to worry about the US.
It’s tempting to dismiss the story in Monday’s Wall Street Journal suggesting that China may have around 3,000 nuclear warheads as the kind of reporting that could only be considered ‘fair and balanced’ on Fox News, and so just ignore it. After all, as long ago as 2004, Jeffrey Lewis tracked down the origin of media reports cited by the Journal that China has 2,350 nuclear weapons. Embarrassingly, the source is an online essay based on bogus US intelligence information that was posted by a Singapore University student.
Moreover, it hardly seems worth wasting time explaining why it’s invalid to estimate the size of China’s contemporary arsenal by taking a 1960s US intelligence report that predicted how many warheads China would have in 1973, and then assuming that it has built up at a constant rate since then. What does make the article worth engaging with, however, is its inability to even try to understand China’s strategic challenges, and why it might go to some fairly extreme lengths to try to solve them.
The purpose of the Journal article is to raise awareness of China’s nuclear modernization and the ‘immense strategic leverage’ it would supposedly give China in a war. Now, I certainly don’t claim to know why China is modernizing its nuclear force. China’s modernization may be offensively orientated. Perhaps Beijing really does wish to change the status quo in its favour by force of nuclear arms. The ‘facts’ collected by the Journal, however, provide no evidence—for or against—these propositions.
The article focuses on the vast network of underground tunnels, the ‘Underground Great Wall,’ which China has built to protect its nuclear forces. ‘For decades,’ writes Bret Stephens in that knowing tone adopted by the Journal’s finest, ‘nuclear experts have understood that the key to “winning” a nuclear exchange is to have an effective second-strike capability, which in turn requires both a sizable and survivable force.’
Wrong. A survivable second-strike capability is the key to not losing a nuclear exchange. It ensures that an adversary can’t disarm you and then use nuclear threats to bend you to his will. Even if China had 3,000 warheads all mounted on intercontinental ballistic missiles—which it doesn’t—it could still not disarm the United States. Apart from the inability of inaccurate Chinese missile to destroy hardened American silos, the four or more US submarines (each of which is armed with about 100 warheads) that are at sea at any given time ensure the invulnerability of the US deterrent.
By contrast, China does have reasonable grounds to fear that the United States is seeking a war-winning nuclear capability. The United States deploys something just shy of 2,000 strategic warheads, with more in reserve. Its delivery systems are exquisitely accurate. It’s developing conventional weapons designed to hunt down mobile missiles. And, on top of that, Washington has consistently refused requests from Beijing to explicitly state that the United States isn’t seeking the ability to eliminate China’s nuclear forces.
Photo Credit: Flickr / Watchsmart
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China Wong
So what should China do?Do nothing and be like the opium era China or Mao’s China with people’s war tactics?The US doesn’t have to occupy China. All it has to do is destroy China’s military power in the past.
Now wait a minute.It aint as easy as it looks. China is bilding up the capability to give the US a stinging rebuff or a bloody nose. Granted China will lose but its better to inflict some pain if the US wants to prevail.That is what is bothering the Pentagon.You see US forces are used to operating in a sfae environment with the risk od enemy attack in the zero range.
Heck the Us is ten thousand miles away and want to operate in waters near China. Now what would the US do if PLA nuclear submarines paterol off the US coast?You can’t have it both ways.
Btw if the US wants to attack China with minimum cost it’s now as on Jan 11 2012.
As time goes on the damage to the US will be significant and will get costlier.The PLA aint itching for fight with a bully but like a good scout the motto is: be prepared.
flyboi
Yay, we have yet another neo-liberal egalitarian pro-globalizationist on the Middle Kingdom’s patrol. Happy, happy, joy, joy.
ginal
I’ve taken an interest in the developement of Chinese nuclear delivery systems for many years now and read Yang Zheng’s paper in about 1997. Made a lot o sense to me, but it has always been considered an outlier in mainstream discussion.
I’ve also followed for at least fifteen years the speculation on the number of warheads and missiles available to China. I spent a few hours trolling the net in 2001 following the US spy plane incident at Hainan island. I was living in Japan at the time and there was a bit of a panic on.
One of the things that really strikes me is how few weapons have been added to the Chinese nuclear arsenal over the last ten years. That is if you beleive the conventional US analysis. I find it incredible that the consensus is that China has only marginally increased its weapons stockpile over the last ten years whereas my intuition (based on their enormous economic growth) suggests that by now they should have enough deliverable Nukes to turn every major city and medium sized town in the US (and quite a bit of the rest of world too) into glass.
In fact sometimes I have my suspicions that the US defence establishment is deliberately downplaying Chinese missile numbers so as not to alarm their population and to maintain the myth of US nuclear invincibility.
Oh well, we’ll find out when both countries, and probaly quite a few others, cease to exist. I hope to be in a target free zone but that’s diffiult to arrange with certainly nowadays. I have visons of Mexican scavengers wandering around the radioactives wasteland of the former US. Satisfying visions I must say. But I think it’s inevitable given current US polcy.