Counterforce Dilemmas and the Risk of Nuclear War in East Asia

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ABSTRACT

The discovery of new Chinese nuclear missile silos, a seemingly escalating nuclear-conventional arms competition between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (ROK), and the announcement that Australia, in concert with the United States and the United Kingdom, is pursuing nuclear-powered attack submarines are events that collectively indicate a worsening security environment in East Asia. Using geostrategic, operational, and technological factors as the basis for analysis, this paper contextualizes these and other developments and assesses the potential for nuclear war in East Asia in general and on the Korean Peninsula in particular. The most dangerous threat to strategic stability is a counterforce dilemma where the conventional weapons of the United States, China, and regional East Asian actors may create strategic instability by their intentional or inadvertent entanglement or use to target the nuclear forces of another state, resulting in pursuit of more secure second-strike capability by the countries of the region, and forming the heart of conventional warfighting and deterrence strategies. The many different conflictual or competitive relationships across the region make arms control initiatives unlikely to succeed, but the maritime nature of the geostrategic environment and the lack of existential threat that the United States and China pose to each other may offer fewer natural pathways to the use of nuclear weapons for either China or the United States than there were for the adversaries in the Cold War.

KEYWORDS:

• United states
• China
• conventional capabilities
• nuclear war
• counterforce
• Korean peninsula

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Strategic instability arises either when first-strike incentives increase due to a specific crisis or when weapons developments lead to fear that mutual vulnerability is undermined (Williams 2019, 792; Miles 2016, 425)..

² It should be noted that the US usually avoids being entrapped or entangled by an ally’s actions, as alliance commitments are sufficiently flexible to allow Washington leeway in decision-making (Beckley 2015)..

³ These concepts include Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) and the Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons (JAM-GC)..

⁴ The waters within the first Island chain are those bounded by Borneo, the Philippines, the Ryukyu Islands, and the Japanese Archipelago..

⁵ For a thorough discussion on inadvertent nuclear war and the risk to command and control systems, see Acton (2018)..

⁶ The four risks are taken from Bowers and Hiim (2020/2021, 31–36)..

⁷ This was the first of three claimed hypersonic glide vehicle missile tests (Agence France-Presse 2022)..

Additional information

Funding

This paper is prepared for Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons Use in Northeast Asia (NU-NEA), a project co-sponsored by Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University (RECNA), Asia Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (APLN) and Nautilus Institute with collaboration of Panel on Peace and Security of Northeast Asia (PSNA). Additional funding is provided by the MacArthur Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Ian Bowers

Ian Bowers is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Joint Operations at the Royal Danish Defense College. His research focuses on deterrence, the future operational environment, sea power, and East Asian security. His research has been published in several international journals including International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, the Naval War College Review, and the Korean Journal of Defense Analysis. His most recent co-authored work, titled “Conventional Counterforce Dilemmas: South Korea’s Deterrence Strategy and Stability on the Korean Peninsula”, was published in International Security. Bowers has also published a monograph on the modernization of the Republic of Korea Navy, and edited volumes on sea power and military change. Bowers holds a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London.