Vehicles carrying nuclear-capable DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missiles in Beijing, Oct. 1.Photo: Visual China Group via Getty Images
Nov. 13, 2019 6:00 pm ET
Doubtless the president would not be delighted by the likening of his administration to a giant fat guy who has never skied, pushing off from the top of a double-black-diamond slope and on his way down taking out flags, trees, and people. And yet somehow amid the chaos and ceaseless acceleration quite a few things have been done right. One of them, invisible to and above the horizons of the lacquered info-babes and mouth-breathing morons who inhabit cable news, is that unlike previous, negligent administrations of both parties, this one has addressed the need to bring China into a nuclear arms-control regime.
It was unnecessary when China was a neophyte and the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were nuked up with scores of thousands of warheads and delivery vehicles, making nuclear stability a question for the two superpowers alone. Nuclear strategy must account for analogies to the three-body problem in physics—i.e., there is neither predictability nor stability when more than two bodies act on each other. Unless one (like a spacecraft too small to perturb the orbital relationship between two planets, or the early Chinese nuclear capacity, dwarfed by that of the U.S. and the Soviets) is de minimis.
A perilously neglected problem of the past 20 years or so is that China is no longer so bereft of nuclear weapons as to be dismissible. If the relationship among the now three dominant nuclear powers is not clarified and disciplined, China’s maturing nuclear warfare capabilities will remain both a direct threat to the U.S. and a potent destabilizer of the balance of terror. We know of its rapidly growing families of silo-based, mobile, sea-based, and bomber-deliverable short-, intermediate-, and intercontinental-range delivery systems. We also know that China’s nuclear infrastructure—including production and certain modes of deployment—is housed in an astounding 3,000 miles of elaborate tunnels.
This means we have little knowledge of what China actually possesses, and because we cannot do without such intelligence, bringing China into a control regime is critical. To paraphrase Rep. Ilhan Omar (Philo-Semite, Minn.), it’s all about the verification, baby. And finally an American administration realizes it.
That this has struck a nerve in China was perhaps inadvertently revealed by Zhou Bo, a senior colonel of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. In a recent article on these pages, he states that China’s Ministry of National Defense laughed at Chinese inclusion, because “either the U.S. and Russia would need to bring their nuclear arsenals down to China’s level, or China would need to increase the size of its arsenal drastically.” Why would China possibly object? Unless of course more warheads and delivery vehicles than it admits to were to be secreted in the immense tunnel network known as the Great Underground Wall. And were China as innocuous and lightly armed as he claims, what would be the harm of inspections?
The administration should vigorously pursue this initiative and refuse to let it drop or to treat it as a sacrificial chip in the trade war (it is far more important than that). Success is guaranteed one way or another. Either China will be brought into a system of nuclear stabilization, or it will reveal to the world that it is hiding something very dangerous. No reason exists for anyone other than China—if it is determined upon deception—to oppose such an exercise, but inevitably, in the West, some will.
Contrary to longstanding positions in regard to American nuclear weapons and arms control in general, they will say that numbers don’t matter. So what if China amasses an overwhelming nuclear force in its tunnels? As long as the U.S. has the minimum required to inflict unacceptable damage on China (or Russia) there is no need to worry about bean counting.
But we don’t define acceptable damage, they do. Especially because China has (as do Russia and North Korea but not the U.S.) invulnerable mobile missiles, numbers are important not merely psychologically but, in the horrific nuclear calculus, in making a first strike conceivable by assuring the capacity for second, third, or even fourth strikes.
In simple terms, if I can strike and reduce your nuclear deterrent without hitting your cities, you will have only enough to retaliate against my cities. But if in exchange for that I can reduce your entire country to glass, you will not retaliate. Mere recognition of this puts me in a commanding position without actually resorting to nuclear war. This is only one reason why numbers matter, and the calculus is further complicated by missile defense and the counters to it.
Suffice it to say that China learned in facing the massively greater American nuclear deterrent that its options were severely limited. Now its ambitions are such that it wants to turn the tables. Once, the West crippled China with the opium trade. Now China supplies American addicts with fentanyl. Once, the West sold China manufactured goods in exchange for commodities. Now China sells us manufactured goods in exchange for commodities. Once, Western military bases ringed the world. Now, as the West retreats, China is installing networks of bases in almost exact imitation.
What are the odds—contrary to common sense and to China’s perceived interests, goals, ambitions, plans, declarations, and recent actions—that, taking into account the almost unimaginable 3,000 miles of tunnels, it has only the relatively small numbers of weapons that Col. Zhou affirms? China should be eager to join the two other leading powers in attempting to control the ever-present nuclear danger, and liberals and arms-control enthusiasts should support and commend any attempt to accomplish this, regardless of which U.S. administration makes the effort.
Matters such as these may not be shiny and sparkling enough to command much airtime, but keep in mind that ultimately what this is all about—the detonation of masses of nuclear weapons—is brighter than a thousand suns.
Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, is author most recently of “Paris in the Present Tense.”
Global View: As China and the United States move towards great power competition, the complexities of the information age could create more unknowns than the nuclear oriented cold war with the Soviet Union. Photo: Getty Images/Istockphoto
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