China’s More Potent Weapons Are Seen as Message to U.S.
WASHINGTON — After decades of maintaining a minimal nuclear force, China has re- engineered many of its long-range ballistic missiles to carry multiple warheads, a step that American officials and policy analysts say appears designed to give pause to the United States as it prepares to deploy robust missile defenses in the Pacific.
The technology of miniaturizing warheads and putting three or more atop a single missile has been in Chinese hands for decades. But Chinese leaders let it sit unused; they were not interested in getting into the kind of arms race that characterized the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Now, President Xi Jinping appears to have altered course, at the same moment that he is building military airfields on disputed islands in the South China Sea, declaring exclusive Chinese “air defense identification zones,” sending Chinese submarines through the Persian Gulf and creating a powerful new arsenal of cyberweapons.
Many of those steps have taken American officials by surprise, in particular after intelligence agen- cies had predicted that Mr. Xi would focus on economic development. The United States Defense Department disclosed Beijing’s new nuclear program in its annual report to Congress about Chinese military capa- bilities. The American secretary of state, John Kerry, recently went to Beijing to discuss security and economic issues, although it remained unclear whether this development with the missiles was on his agenda.
President Barack Obama is under pressure to deploy missile defense systems in the Pacific, although American policy officially states that those interceptors are to counter North Korea. At the same time, the president is trying to signal that he will resist Chinese efforts to intimidate its neighbors.
Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a policy research group in Washington, called the new Chinese warheads “a bad day for nuclear constraint.”
To American officials, China’s move fits into a rapid transformation of their strategy under Mr. Xi. Chinese efforts to reclaim land on disputed islands in the South China Sea underscored the intensity of Mr. Xi’s determination to push potential competitors out into the mid-Pacific.
China has sought technologies to block American surveillance and communications satellites, and its major investments in cybertechnol- ogy are viewed by American officials as a way to steal intellectual property and prepare for future conflict. The upgrade to the nuclear forces fits into that strategy.
“This is obviously part of an effort to prepare for long-term competition with the United States,” said Ashley J. Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. American nuclear forces today outnumber China’s by eight to one. The choice of which missiles to upgrade was notable, he said, because China chose “one of few that can unambiguously reach the United States.”
The United States pioneered multiple warheads early in the Cold War. In theory, one missile could release warheads that adjusted their flight paths so each zoomed toward a different target. The term for the technical advance — multiple independently targetable re- entry vehicle, or MIRV — became one of the Cold War’s most dreaded fixtures. Each re- entry vehicle was a miniaturized hydrogen bomb, more destructive than the weapon that leveled Hiroshima.
In 1999, during the Clinton administration, Republicans in Congress charged that Chinese spies had stolen the secrets of H-bomb miniaturization. But intelligence agencies noted Beijing’s restraint.
The calculus shifted in 2004, when the Bush administration began deploying a ground-based antimissile system in Alaska and California. Early in 2013, the Obama administration, worrying about North Korean nuclear advances, ordered an upgrade. Today, analysts see China’s addition of multiple warheads as at least partly a response to Washington’s antimissile strides.
The Defense Department report, released on May 8, said that Beijing’s most powerful weapon now bore MIRV warheads.
Mr. Kristensen said Beijing’s membership in “the MIRV club strains the credibility of China’s official assurance that it only wants a minimum nuclear deterrent and is not part of a nuclear arms race.”
President Xi Jinping is willing to take steps his predecessors weren’t.