Why is China worried about US defence in Korea?
MAO Zedong famously dismissed the atomic bomb as a “paper tiger”, able to kill and terrify, but not decisive in war. Even so, China built a nuclear arsenal of its own, and now concerns about the effectiveness of that arsenal as a deterrent are driving it into confrontation with the United States over an antimissile system being built in South Korea. Here’s an explanation of why.
China conducted its first nuclear test in 1964, and has developed a stable of nuclear missiles. But it is not a big stable, compared with the thousands of warheads held by the US and Russia.
China does not reveal the size of its nuclear forces. It has about 260 nuclear warheads that could be put on missiles, and by the Pentagon’s latest estimate, China has between 75 and 100 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Some estimates are lower, and one recent assessment said 40 to 50 of China’s ballistic missiles could reach the continental United States.
The United States has deployed about 1,370 nuclear warheads and has stockpiled more than 6,500, and has submarines and aircraft able to launch nuclear weapons.
China has also built several submarines that can launch nuclear missiles. But even its latest-model submarine “is noisy and quite vulnerable to anti-submarine warfare”, and therefore is not a very potent addition to its nuclear deterrent, M Taylor Fravel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Fiona S Cunningham, a graduate student there, who recently published an assessment of China’s nuclear modernisation, said by email.
China has also been upgrading some of its missiles so that several nuclear warheads can be placed on a single missile that then unleashes them on different targets.
China has had the ability to put multiple warheads on missiles since the 1990s, but seems to have done so only recently, when some missiles were installed with three or four warheads, said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on China’s nuclear forces at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.This showed how China has been cautious in playing catch-up to the United States, he said.
“I don’t think that the Chinese and US have, historically, experienced the kind of tit-for-tat modernisation that we saw during the US-Soviet arms race,” Lewis said. “The Chinese more or less modernised for their own reasons and according to their own ideas.”
By the time China joined the nuclear club, the United States and Russia were well ahead in building a stockpile of weapons. Mao decided to stick to a relatively small arsenal big enough to serve as a deterrent, and that decision was made a fait accompli by the political turmoil of Mao’s era, which held back the nuclear weapons program.
“China’s leaders thought that the important thing was to master the technology,” Lewis said. “While the United States did fine calculations of the deterrence balance, Chinese leaders tended to think of deterrence like a checklist of achievements.”
Ever since, Chinese nuclear doctrine has stuck to the idea of a “minimum means of reprisal”, with a force designed to survive and retaliate after an initial nuclear attack. Alongside that, China has a nuclear “no first use” policy: that it will not be the first to launch nuclear weapons against another nuclear foe, and that it will not use its nuclear weapons against a country without nuclear weapons.
Even so, China has been expanding and upgrading its nuclear forces, and that modernisation may speed up if the government feels that it is falling too far behind the United States.
“China is probably confident in its ability to be able to retaliate, but given the size and sophistication of US nuclear forces and the steady development of ballistic missile defenses, coupled with China’s small nuclear arsenal, the margin for error is thin,” Fravel and Cunningham said.
The Chinese government worries that the US anti-missile system, called the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, could erode its nuclear deterrent – its ability to scare off potential foes from ever considering a nuclear attack.
Its chief worry is not that THAAD could take down missiles: the system offers a canopy of potential protection over South Korea, but does not have the reach to bring down China’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. Instead, China’s complaint is focused on THAAD’s radar system, which Chinese experts have said could be used to track the People’s Liberation Army’s missile forces.
Deploying THAAD’s current radar system “would undermine China’s nuclear deterrence by collecting important data on Chinese nuclear warheads”, Li Bin, a nuclear weapons expert at Tsinghua University in Beijing, wrote last week.
He and other Chinese experts say the radar could identify which Chinese mis- siles are carrying decoy warheads intended to outfox foes. That would be like being able to see what cards China holds in a nuclear poker game, and that could weaken China’s deterrent, they say.
China’s real, underlying worry appears to be that THAAD could open the door to a much wider, more advanced fence of anti-missile systems arrayed around it by US allies, several experts said. That would magnify Chinese worries about the effectiveness of its nuclear deterrent, and entrench Chinese fears of encirclement by a coalition knit together by a shared anti-missile system.
“I think this is what really worries them, because then what you have is the basis for a common interoperable system,” said Michael J Green, former senior director for Asia in the National Security Council under president George W Bush. “I think it’s more about the creation of a virtual collective security system,” he said of China’s worries about THAAD.
Last week, the Global Times, a nationalist Chinese newspaper, warned in an editorial that China could consider abandoning its “no first use” policy if THAAD leads to other anti-missile systems deemed threatening to China.
But for now at least such threats are bluster, many experts said. China is far from taking a dramatic step like abandoning its bedrock nuclear policy, they said.
“I don’t see ‘no first use’ going soon – at least most responsible officers and officials stick to the policy, despite ongoing debate behind the scenes,” said Douglas H Paal, a China expert who worked on the National Security Council under presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush.