China is working towards longer-range nuclear missiles for its submarines, allowing it to strike America from its own waters
“I’M NOT AFRAID of nuclear war,” boasted Mao Zedong, China’s leader, in Moscow in 1957. Mao noted that even if half of China’s population were to perish in a radioactive inferno, 300m would remain. His Soviet hosts, who were hardly known for their softhearted devotion to human rights, were shocked. Yet despite Mao’s insouciance, China did not follow America and Russia into the arms race that saw them pile up 60,000 nuclear weapons in the three decades after that speech.
China has a conservative view of deterrence. “China’s attitudes toward nuclear weapons have remained relatively constant from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping,” note Fiona Cunningham of George Washington University and Taylor Fravel of MIT. “China has sought to maintain the smallest possible force capable of surviving a first strike and being able to conduct a retaliatory strike.” But what has sufficed in the past may not in the future.
China fears that such weapons might wipe out most of its warheads and launchers. Even rudimentary American missile-defences would then be able to mop up the “ragged retaliation” from China’s surviving nukes. Many American strategists reckon that this strategy—known as damage limitation—is preferable to accepting mutually assured destruction. America believes that this possibility gives it a psychological advantage in any crisis.
Because new weapons require warheads, nuclear modernisation is also driving nuclear expansion. China’s armed forces “doubled their nuclear arsenal in about the last decade, and they’re on track to double it again in the next decade”, noted Rear Admiral Michael Brooke, director of intelligence for America’s Strategic Command, in August.
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