The Sleeping Dragon: Chinese Nukes (Daniel 7)

China’s Nukes: What Happens in a Showdown with America?

Harry J. Kazianis
December 23, 2015

As the Islamic State dominates national security headlines, tensions between Washington and Beijing on a whole host of issues—think the East and South China Seas, Taiwan, China’s rising conventional military power with growing overseas power projection capabilities etc.—only get the occasional attention they truly deserve. Getting even less attention these days: China’s multi-decade quest to modernize its nuclear weapons arsenal. Beijing is developing nuclear armed missiles that have longer ranges (and yes, they can hit the United States), tipped with multiple warheads that are now being deployed across multiple domains (air, land and now in the ocean).

While recent attention on China’s nuclear arsenal—specifically that Beijing is testing a railcar based mobile intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with a range of 7,500 miles or more—was certainly welcomed, America’s academic community has been keeping a close eye on China’s growing nuclear weapons program for many years. Case in point, a recent article in the renowned academic journal International Security sheds new light on Beijing’s nukes. So what makes this article special? The author’s detailed analysis on an important subtopic: if Beijing will eventually abandon its long-standing nuclear strategy of assured retaliation for what MIT-based authors Fiona Cunningham and M. Taylor Fravel call a “first-use posture” that “will be a critical factor in future U.S.-China strategic stability.”

As I like to do of late, here are the major themes of this recent article, titled Assuring Assured Retaliation: China’s Nuclear Posture and U.S.-China Strategic Stability.

Point #1- Revealing China’s Current Nuclear Posture:

“In general, China has sought to maintain the smallest possible force capable of surviving a first strike and being able to conduct a retaliatory strike that would inflict unacceptable damage on an adversary, at the time and place of China’s choosing. Rather than expend all of its nuclear forces in a single, massive retaliatory strike, China has structured its nuclear forces to conduct multiple waves of large- or small-scale retaliatory strikes. As result, key principles in force development since 1980 have been “close defense” (yanmi fanghu) and “key-point counterstrikes” (zhongdian fanji). Close defense refers to ensuring the survivability of China’s forces, which first emphasized concealment and then mobility. Key-point counterstrikes refer to the means and methods of retaliation and how to inflict unacceptable damage on an adversary. Historically, Chinese planning has targeted population and industrial centers as well as soft military targets, such as military bases.”

The authors also note:

“How much is enough for China? The answer to this question has always been relative to a potential adversary’s capabilities, namely, those of the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia. Historically, China’s leaders have lacked confidence in their ability to assure retaliation. At times, either China has lacked enough weapons or the weapons that it possessed were not sufficiently survivable. By the mid-1990s, for example, China only possessed approximately twenty DF-5 ICBMs capable of reaching the continental United States. These missiles were liquid fueled, which increased the time required to prepare them for launch and reduced their reliability and survivability. The missiles were vulnerable to an enemy strike while they were being fueled, as were the fuel storage areas. China was also concerned about the reliability of its missile technology and the reconnaissance capabilities of its opponents. As a result, China sought to modernize its forces to increase survivability and penetrability. This included developing two road-mobile, solid-fueled missile systems, the DF-31 and DF-31A, as well as a submarine-launched variant, the JL-2, to be used aboard the new Type-094 class of ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs). China’s first-generation Type-092-class SSBN armed with the JL-1 missile encountered so many technological challenges that it never conducted a single deterrent patrol.”

Point #2 – China Fears America’s Missile Defenses

“China’s strategic community views the U.S. development and deployment of ballistic missile defense capabilities as the most serious threat to China’s nuclear deterrent. Chinese analysts believe that the deployment of early warning systems and interceptors gives the United States a rudimentary missile defense capability against Chinese nuclear missiles. China’s strategic community also expects the system to become more integrated and effective in the future. For many, the Obama administration has only slightly altered the Bush administration’s missile defense plan, as U.S. missile defense has bipartisan support and is now a permanent feature of the strategic landscape.”

Point #3 – The Future of China’s Nuclear Posture:

“Chinese concerns about U.S. capabilities are likely to further underscore the ambiguity that China has allowed to persist regarding its no-first-use policy. In the mid-2000s, a debate over whether to maintain the policy occurred within China amid concerns about a future conflict over Taiwan’s unification involving the United States. The debate was prompted in large part by the prospect of conventional strikes against Chinese nuclear capabilities and nonnuclear strategic targets, such as the Three Gorges Dam.”

Mining Mandarin sources, the authors feel:

“China is unlikely to alter its nuclear strategy. That is, the pursuit of a lean and effective force to conduct a retaliatory campaign to deter a first strike against China remains the basis of China’s nuclear strategy. Even though China is expanding the size and sophistication of its arsenal, sources and individuals consulted for this article indicate, in essence, that China will seek to achieve the goals contained in its current strategy and not pursue new ones, such as the ability to conduct a first strike on an adversary’s nuclear weapons. As the Science of Military Strategy describes, “China’s nuclear force employment follows the principle of ‘striking after the enemy has struck’ (houfa zhiren); a nuclear counterattack is the only type (yangshi) of combat employment for Chinese nuclear forces. The relative superiority or inferiority of China’s nuclear counterattack capability directly influences the effectiveness of its nuclear deterrence. Therefore, the fundamental goals of the development of the Second Artillery are to effectively increase the number of missiles to ensure that a sufficient number are available for a nuclear counterattack, and to increase the effectiveness of an actual nuclear counterattack.” The main challenge from China’s perspective is how best to achieve a secure second-strike capability in light of the continued development of missiles defenses and various long-range conventional strike capabilities.”

Final Point – Chinese Nuclear Ambiguity Could Make a Showdown with America Dangerous:

“China’s continued commitment to a nuclear strategy of assured retaliation with a small but robust nuclear force structure avoids the wastefulness of Cold War arms racing. To deter U.S. conventional attacks on its nuclear forces, however, China relies on limited ambiguity over its no-first-use policy, which could make a future U.S.-Chinese crisis more dangerous. China appears willing to accept this risk because its assessments of crisis stability in the U.S.-China relationship are relatively optimistic…Even if Chinese analysts accurately assess the nuclear risks present in a U.S.-China contingency, their optimism is unwarranted because it is not shared by the United States and because China likely underestimates U.S. assessments of the stakes in a potential crisis.”

Clearly I am cherry picking some of the major highlights of a very scholarly and important forty-three-page academic article. Considering past works by Fravel when it comes to Chinese nuclear doctrine are now assigned reading at many of the top security studies programs around the world, Asia hands should consider the ideas in this paper very seriously. But don’t take my word for it: read the whole thing.

Russia Prepares For The Nuclear Showdown (Daniel 7:7)

 

Russia Has Intensified Its Nuclear Rhetoric, But Why?

Posted By: Vikas ShuklaPosted date: August 18, 2015 03:06:28 PM

In the past few years, Russia’s nuclear posture has become extremely aggressive. Recently, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called Moscow’s nuclear saber rattling “destabilizing and dangerous.” In March this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed that the country was fully prepared to drop nukes on any country that interfered in the annexation of Crimea.

Russia has failed to address some key problems

This March, the Kremlin warned Denmark that it would become a target of Russian nukes if it joined the U.S.-led missile defense system. A month later, Russia threatened to go nuclear if NATO moved more troops to the Baltic states. What’s more, a senior Russian military strategist suggested in April that Moscow should detonate nuclear weapons on the Yellowstone National Park and the San Andreas line in the event of war to “ensure complete destruction” of the United States.

Why is Russia under Vladimir Putin issuing nuclear threats every now and then? The country is spending 4.5% of its GDP on defense, and its military is undergoing a massive, 10-year long modernization program. More than half a dozen military experts told Politico that Russia is trying to hide the weakness of its conventional forces. The size and quality of the country’s conventional forces are far inferior to those of NATO.

Pavel Baev of Peace Research Institute told Politico that the Soviet Union had more than 500,000 troops in East Germany in the mid-1980s. Today, Russia has only about 50,000 troops near the Ukrainian border. Of course, Russia’s military modernization program has led to the development of some advanced weapons. But the country has failed to address some crucial problems like its conscription system and technological inferiority.

There isn’t much Russia can use as a threat

Russian Navy currently has only one aircraft carrier, compared to more than 20 of the United States. And Moscow doesn’t expect its next-gen aircraft carrier to enter service before 2030. Russia’s air force fleet is easily dwarfed by that of the U.S. So, Putin has resorted to the nuclear card to send a signal that Russia is still a dominant power in the region. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Moscow still has about 7,500 nuclear warheads.

Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based Russian nuclear expert, said there wasn’t much Putin could use as a threat. Given the inferiority of Russia’s conventional forces, nuclear rhetoric is the last resort.

A Sure Recipe For THE END (Revelation 15)

Fewer bombs, but nuclear states ‘determined’ to keep arsenals: SIPRI

Just Some of The Nuclear Horns

By Fredrik Dahl, Reuters
4:06 pm, June 15, 2014
By Fredrik Dahl

VIENNA (Reuters) – Nuclear-armed states are modernizing their arsenals and appear determined to keep sizable numbers of such weapons of mass destruction for the foreseeable future, the SIPRI think-tank said in its annual report on Monday.

Five years after U.S. President Barack Obama set out a vision of a world without nuclear weapons, the findings by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute made clear just how distant that goal remains.

While there has been a steady decline in the number of nuclear warheads in the world over the past five years, nine countries still had a total of 16,300 such weapons in early 2014 – down by around 5.6 percent from the previous year – of which some 4,000 were operational.

And the pace of reductions seems to be slowing compared with a decade ago, the Swedish think-tank said.

“Once again this year, the nuclear weapon-possessing states took little action to indicate a genuine willingness to work toward complete dismantlement of their nuclear arsenals,” wrote SIPRI researchers Shannon Kile and Phillip Patton Schell.

The Cold War-era enemies United States and Russia together hold about 93 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons and their reductions under the New Start treaty ratified in 2011 were the main factor behind the decline in global numbers.

SIPRI identified seven other nuclear weapon states – Britain, France, China, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea.

The United States, Russia, France, Britain and China are the world’s five officially recognized nuclear weapons states. The four others are outside the global Non-Proliferation Treaty, designed to prevent the spread of atomic arms.

Non-nuclear weapon states often criticizes the five for not sufficiently living up to their part of the central bargain of the 1970 NPT, when nations without atomic bombs pledged not to seek them and nuclear states agreed to pursue disarmament talks.

The United States and Russia “have extensive modernization programs under way for their remaining nuclear delivery systems, warheads, and production facilities”, the SIPRI report said.
The nuclear arsenals of the others are considerably smaller, but they are “either developing or deploying new weapons or have announced their intention to do so”.

\Israel is widely assumed to be the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed power, drawing frequent Iranian and Arab condemnation. Israel for its part accuses Iran of developing a capability to assemble such arms, a charge Tehran denies.

Obama gave new impetus to the often halting process of disarmament in his 2009 speech in Prague, and last year he proposed further cutting nuclear arsenals by a third.

However, his aim has produced mixed results so far, not least because of a plan by the United States and NATO to build an anti-missile shield around Western Europe, which Russia has said could erode its nuclear deterrent.

Moscow has frequently said it is unlikely to go for further cuts in its nuclear arsenal unless its concerns are addressed.

“Russia is in the middle of a broad upgrade of its strategic nuclear forces that over the next decade will retire all Soviet-era inter-continental ballistic missiles,” SIPRI said.

Of the nine states covered in its report, SIPRI estimated that North Korea – which has carried out three nuclear tests since 2006 in defiance of international sanctions and condemnations – had the fewest weapons, with six to eight.

“There is an emerging consensus in the expert community that North Korea has produced a small number of nuclear weapons, as distinct from rudimentary nuclear explosive devices,” it said.

While North Korea has long boasted of making strides in acquiring a “nuclear deterrent”, there had been general scepticism that it could master the step of miniaturizing a nuclear warhead to mount on a ballistic missile.

But there has been a shift in thinking since it conducted a nuclear test in February last year. There have been on-off indications that it is preparing another, and some experts now say it may be closer than previously thought to putting a nuclear warhead on a missile. [ID:nL3N0O12OB]

However, SIPRI said there was “no public evidence to date that it has developed a sufficiently compact nuclear warhead or other key technologies for a nuclear-armed ballistic missile”.

(Editing by Kevin Liffey)