Introduction

Abstract

China's nuclear arsenal has long been an enigma. It is a small force, based almost exclusively on land-based ballistic missiles, maintained at a low level of alert and married to a no-first-use doctrine – all choices that would seem to invite attack in a crisis. Chinese leaders, when they have spoken about nuclear weapons, have articulated ideas that sound odd to the Western ear. Mao Zedong's oft-quoted remark that ‘nuclear weapons are a paper tiger’ seems to be bluster or madness. China's nuclear forces are now too important to remain a mystery. Yet Westerners continue to disagree about basic factual information concerning one of the world's most important nuclear-weapons states. This Adelphi book documents and explains the evolution of China's nuclear forces in terms of historical, bureaucratic and ideological factors. There is a strategic logic at work, but that logic is mediated through politics, bureaucracy and ideology. The simplest explanation is that Chinese leaders, taken as a whole, have tended to place relatively little emphasis on the sort of technical details that dominated US discussions regarding deterrence. Such profound differences in thinking about nuclear weapons could lead to catastrophic misunderstanding in the event of a military crisis between Beijing and Washington.

China's nuclear arsenal has long been an enigma for Western policymakers and issue experts. The arsenal has historically been small, based almost exclusively on land-based ballistic missiles, maintained at a low level of alert, and married to a no-first-use doctrine – all choices that would seem to invite attack in a crisis. Chinese leaders, when they have spoken about nuclear weapons, have articulated ideas that sound odd to the Western ear. Mao Zedong's oft-quoted remark that ‘nuclear weapons are a paper tiger’ seems to be bluster or madness.

Western officials and experts often express frustration at the level of transparency and dialogue with the Chinese government and other interlocutors. Given China's growing economic, political and military influence, its small nuclear force looms ever larger in Western calculations. Our collective inability to understand the logic behind China's nuclear forces, policy and posture is frustrating.

In an earlier work, I argued that the Chinese arsenal was not so strange if one accepted the notion that China's leaders simply viewed nuclear weapons differently to their Western counterparts – or acted as though they did.¹ For a variety of bureaucratic, historical and ideological reasons, Chinese leaders have placed less emphasis on technical details than their Western counterparts when it comes to assessing the stability of deterrence.² Imagine Chinese political leaders left cold by the econometric logic of Albert Wohlstetter's Delicate Balance of Terror, just as we Westerners find little to recommend in Mao's earthy aphorisms.

China's nuclear forces are now too important to remain a mystery. Yet Westerners continue to disagree about basic factual information concerning one of the world's most important nuclear-weapons states. Chinese statements are often cryptic or simply difficult for foreigners to accept. Meetings among Westerners and Chinese seem to cover the same ground, year after year. Enlightenment is elusive.

These disagreements replicate themselves in fundamental ones about how, as a policy matter, the United States and its allies should approach China's nuclear forces. In the US, this debate takes the form of a question about ‘whether China is a small Russia to be deterred or a large North Korea to be defended against’.³ The implicit distinction in this phrasing is whether Washington accepts that China's nuclear forces provide an inescapable measure of deterrence as Russia's do, or whether some combination of nuclear and conventional weapons including missile defences could allow the US to prevail in a conflict where China used its nuclear weapons.

In one sense this is an artificial debate. The notion that the US would accept Russia or the Soviet Union as an equal never commanded formal consensus in the US – the descriptor mutual assured destruction (MAD) was a calumny. In another sense, it has the comfort of the familiar; Washington did accept the notion of mutual deterrence with Moscow implicitly. Recent statements from the Obama administration suggest that, whatever reluctance may inhibit a public recognition of mutual deterrence with China, the administration treats China and Russia as like cases, distinct from North Korea.

This Adelphi book documents and explains the evolution of China's nuclear forces in terms of historical, bureaucratic and ideological factors. It argues that China's nuclear force, policy and posture look the way they do because of circumstance. There is a strategic logic, but that logic is mediated through politics, bureaucracy and ideology. The simplest explanation is that Chinese leaders, taken as a whole, have tended to place relatively little emphasis on the sort of technical details that dominated US discussions regarding the stability of deterrence. Such a general statement, however, smoothes over the debates and divisions that make the evolution of China's deterrent so interesting.

This book is also, at least implicitly, a critical reading of US intelligence estimates regarding China's nuclear weapons and missile programmes. Although a considerable amount of open-source information is now available regarding the history of China's strategic weapons programmes, this has only recently been the case. For many years, Western analysts had to rely on declassified or leaked intelligence assessments that often turned out to be wrong or incomplete. The overall record of US intelligence analyses of Chinese capabilities was excellent in hindsight, but analysts struggled to understand decisions in terms of Chinese politics, often substituting a sort of post hoc explanation burdened with American assumptions and attitudes. What China was doing was often more clear than why it was doing it.

Questions about the kinds of arguments the Chinese have among themselves, both about Chinese society in general and about the nature of nuclear weapons, illuminate the limits of imagining China as a ‘little Russia’ or a ‘big North Korea’. If we are to think in this vein, perhaps China is an ‘inscrutable France’! Such an answer may seem silly, but so is the notion that China is best understood as a Russia, a North Korea or any country other than itself. Just as a zen koan creates a brief, liberating moment of rupture that illuminates a question, laughing at a nonsensical answer to a nonsensical question can allow a reader to abandon confining analogies and develop an understanding of the Chinese nuclear arsenal on its own terms.⁴ What that understanding might be for China's nuclear forces, policy and posture is argued in the following pages.

Notes

1 Jeffrey Lewis, Minimum Means of Reprisal: China's Search for Security in the Nuclear Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). For a more recent review, see: Jeffrey Lewis, ‘China's Nuclear Modernization: Surprise, Restraint, and Uncertainty’, in Ashley Tellis, Abraham Denmark and Travis Tanner (eds), Strategic Asia 2013–2014: Asia in the Second Nuclear Age (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2014), pp. 67–98.

2 These factors are discussed in more detail in Jeffrey Lewis, ‘Chinese Nuclear Posture and Force Modernization’, Nonproliferation Review, vol. 16, no. 2, July 2009, pp. 197–209.

3 William Perry, Brent Scowcroft and Charles Ferguson, U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy, Independent Task Force Report No. 62 (New York, NY: Council on Foreign Relations, 2009), p. 45.

4 The phrase brief ‘liberating moment of rupture’ is borrowed from Frithjof Schuon, ‘Remarks on the Enigma of the Koan’, Studies in Comparative Religion, vol. 5, no. 2, Spring 1971.