Nuclear submarines raise the stakes in the South China Sea
- The Australian
- November 07, 2015 12:00A
The US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen sailed within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef. Source: Reuters
If you think things are a bit willing in the South China Sea now, after the US
sailed the USS Lassen within 12 nautical miles of Beijing’s
artificially created establishment on Subi Reef, wait until China moves
nuclear weapons into the region, later this year or early next year.
First of all, though, let’s not panic. Beijing is certainly a
rational actor and has generally avoided giant blunders. Just lately it
has undertaken a number of reassuring moves and gestures.It sent Premier Li Keqiang to participate in a three-way summit with South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Seoul. It was not necessary for Abe to climb down from any of Japan’s recent strategic positions for this summit to proceed successfully.
A summit involving Li is less significant than one involving China’s President Xi Jinping.
Nonetheless, good vibes come from this meeting.
Second, and perhaps much more significantly, the USS Lassen was shadowed by a Chinese vessel as it sailed within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef. But the Chinese vessel observed all the proper protocols for such a situation.
This sort of behaviour has not always been forthcoming from Chinese vessels and planes during the past few years. Senior Americans had become very worried about the way some Chinese military assets had behaved like cowboys in the Pacific, buzzing their American counterparts in the air or sailing so close that at times they barely avoided collision.
Calm behaviour in difficult circumstances has a lot to recommend it.
Third, Beijing’s reaction to the US freedom of navigation exercise was relatively modest. There were strident statements from some Chinese military leaders, but these were balanced by more calm and reassuring talk from China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi. It is very difficult to decipher precisely such richly nuanced and intentionally contradictory messages from Beijing, but overall the reaction was less strident than might have been expected.
And finally, Xi has decided to conduct an informal summit with Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou in Singapore today.
This is almost certainly designed to increase the vote for Ma’s embattled Kuomintang (KMT) party in the forthcoming Taiwanese presidential election, which the KMT is likely to lose.
Granting a presidential audience is exactly the right way for a confident, big power to seek to influence the vote in a smaller nation. It is infinitely to be preferred to trying to influence a vote by firing missiles or engaging in other displays of military intimidation.
Four swallows do not a summer make but let’s register all these small positive signs.
Now, back to the Chinese nuclear weapons. Of all the world’s big nuclear powers, China is the one that is undergoing the greatest change to move from a posture of general deterrence to one of specifically being able to fight a nuclear war.
It is of the utmost importance to recognise that it is almost inconceivable that China or anyone else will ever want to, or have to, fight a nuclear war. But nations that possess nuclear weapons take these capabilities very seriously and pay a lot of attention to their order of battle.
In recent years Beijing has been developing its own nuclear-armed submarines. Such submarines give a nation an unbeatable second strike capacity.
Thus, theoretically, an adversary could strike pre-emptively and wipe out all of a nation’s land-based nuclear missiles.
http://andrewtheprophet.comBut nuclear-armed submarines deep under water cannot be taken out like that. They can always strike back.
During the past few years Beijing has shifted the base for its nuclear submarines from the north of China to Hainan Island, in the South China Sea.
Hainan is indisputably Chinese and no one doubts Beijing’s sovereignty over this island.
The Chinese don’t give out too much information about their nuclear submarines but the US military estimates that the Chinese navy will begin full operational patrols of its nuclear-armed subs at the end of this year or early next year.
The presence of Chinese nuclear-armed subs in the South China Sea with Hainan as their base does inevitably give a different character to the massive facilities Beijing is building elsewhere in the sea, in all the disputed bits of rock and submerged reefs it has claimed.
The idea of the South China Sea as the strategic basin for China’s subs has some problems. This sea is generally shallow and subs hide best in the deep — and there is the whole Pacific Ocean to hide in.
But there are some deep-water trenches in the South China Sea, one in particular near Scarborough Reef, which the Chinese a few years ago displaced The Philippines from.
If the Chinese have their submarine nuclear deterrent force sailing around the South China Sea, they will be even keener to dissuade the Americans from having any military and intelligence assets there.
The US, on the other hand, will be even more determined to be present in a big way and to know about everything that moves.
This will mean the specifically military dimension of the South China Sea disagreements will become more important.
Malcolm Cook, a senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, wrote recently: “China’s concentration of its SSBN (nuclear-armed submarine) fleet and patrols in the South China Sea is turning the sea into a major arena for the strategic rivalry between the US and China.”
He further argued that the facilities Beijing was building in the disputed territories of the South China Sea “could also serve as part of a bastion strategy to protect China’s SSBN fleet by extending China’s ability to provide surface and air protection to this most important undersea capability”.
Disputed waters; massive new military facilities; territorial expansion contested against regional neighbours; two determined big powers, though with the superpower experiencing very weak and uncertain leadership; a whole lot of middle powers, including Australia, that also want to maintain freedom of navigation and freedom of overflight; a history of conflict; and a fleet of nuclear armed submarines — it’s not exactly the most reassuring mixture in history.
• There were electronic media reports this week that Tony Abbott said to me recently words to the effect that he would be a different prime minister in a second Abbott government. This story is completely and absolutely untrue.
Neither Abbott nor, for that matter, any other Liberal MP has since his removal as PM canvassed with me any notion of a comeback. There are no shades of grey here. No such conversation ever occurred and I certainly never reported such a conversation to anyone because it never occurred in the first place.
I now understand how our politicians feel when complete falsehoods about them get a good airing. This is case of Chinese whispers without even a single, solitary, initial whisper.
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