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China appears to be accelerating the expansion of its nuclear arsenal and may be exploring the development of non-nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking the US, according to a new Pentagon report.
The report, an annual survey of Chinese military capabilities mandated by Congress, said conventional, non-nuclear ICBMs would allow China to “threaten conventional strikes against targets in the continental US, Hawaii and Alaska”.
Dennis Wilder, a former top CIA China expert, said the warning about conventional ICBMs was very concerning because they could destabilise the military balance and complicate the situation for military planners.
“China could, in a US-China crisis, for the first time threaten strikes against major US population centres without having to cross the nuclear threshold, which risks a massive US nuclear barrage in response,” said Wilder.
He added that another problem was that conventional ICBMs “would likely be indistinguishable from their nuclear ICBMs” which would severely complicate the early warning system for US Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Underscoring the focus China had put on boosting its nuclear forces, the report said its stockpile of operational nuclear warheads reached 500 by May 2023, putting it on track to exceed projections. It forecast that China would likely have more than 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2030.
Despite the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, China remains the pre-eminent security threat in the minds of many US policymakers and the Pentagon report on the People’s Liberation Army is closely watched by budget-setters in the White House and Congress in order to set spending priorities.
China has been rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal in recent years, suggesting that Beijing is moving away from its decades-old policy of having only a “lean and effective” nuclear deterrent.
A senior US defence official said China had previously refused to hold talks about nuclear weapons — known as “strategic stability talks” — because of the disparity of the size of the US and Chinese arsenals, but said the Pentagon hoped Beijing would now become more willing.
The US has 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads, as permitted under the New Start arms control treaty.
“As we see them building up to larger numbers, that raises some questions . . . [about] whether they might perhaps, in line with what they’ve stated previously, be more willing to be more transparent,” the official said.
The PLA has also been heavily investing in its space capabilities. The Pentagon said China conducted more than 60 successful space launches in 2022, which was a threefold increase from five years previously. The launches put more than 180 satellites in orbit, a fivefold rise from 2017.
The Pentagon said China was increasingly using the PLA as an “instrument of statecraft”, conducting more coercive actions against the US and its allies. Those activities included high-risk manoeuvres around foreign aircraft and ships, as well as discharging chaff or flares in proximity to rival aircraft. It said China had conducted almost 300 “risky and coercive” aerial interceptions of US and allied aircraft over the past two years.
The report said Beijing was continuing to resist reopening the military-military communication channels with Washington that Beijing halted after Nancy Pelosi, the then US House Speaker, visited Taiwan in August last year.
After nearly two years of frosty relations between Beijing and the Biden administration, a handful of US cabinet secretaries have visited China in recent months, in a possible sign of a thaw in non-military relations.
Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi is expected to visit Washington later this month for talks about a possible summit between President Joe Biden and Xi Jinping if the Chinese leader attends the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in San Francisco next month.
The Pentagon said the PLA was exploring security strategies that would use artificial intelligence and big data to find vulnerabilities in the US that it could then target. Earlier this week, FBI director Christopher Wray and his counterparts from the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing network — the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada — warned that China was trying to steal AI technology for military purposes.
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