Strategic stability and regional security

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.

Notes

1 Kurt Campbell and Richard Weitz, ‘The Limits of U.S.-China Military Cooperation: Lessons from 1995– 1999’, Washington Quarterly, vol. 29, Winter 2005, pp. 169–86.

2 William J. Perry, Memorandum for the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, ‘U.S.–China Military Relationship’, August 1994. Reprinted in ‘China and the United States: From Hostility to Engagement’, 1960-1998, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 19, Jeffrey T. Richelson (ed.), 24 September 1999, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB19/12-01.htm.

3 Campbell and Weitz, ‘The Limits of U.S.–China Military Cooperation’.

4 Other steps during the Bush administration include then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's visit to the PLA Second Artillery headquarters in 2005; House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton's August 2007 visit to the Academy of Military Sciences that included a meeting with then-Second Artillery commander Jing Zhiyuan; the December 2007 Defense Consultative Talks (DCTs) between General Ma Xiaotian and then-Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman; the April 2008 US–China Nuclear Dialogue between General Huang Xing and Brian Green; and a June 2008 US– China Security Dialogue between Assistant Foreign Minister He Yafei and then-Acting Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Rood. Summaries of most of these meetings are available in the leaked State Department cables. For a list of military-to-military contacts, including defence department engagement on nuclear issues with China, see Shirley A. Kan, ‘U.S.–China Military Contacts: Issues for Congress’, Congressional Research Service, 12 June 2014, https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32496.pdf.

5 Describing his November 2007 trip to Beijing, Gates writes that ‘Bush and Hu had agreed in April 2006 to pursue bilateral discussions of nuclear strategy, but it was pretty plain that the People's Liberation Army hadn't received the memo’. Robert Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Knopf, 2014), p. 195. The US and China ultimately included a ‘discussion of nuclear policy at the December 2007 Defense Consultative Talks (DCTs) between General Ma Xiaotian and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman’. This meeting is described in a leaked 2 February 2011 cable from the US Embassy in Bejing titled ‘U.S.–China Security Dialogue Working Lunch: Strategic Security, Missile Defense, Space, Nonpro, Iran’. The document is available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wikileaks-files/china-wikileaks/8299322/U.S.-CHINA-SECURITY-DIALOGUE-WORKING-LUNCH-STRATEGIC-SECURITY-MISSILE-DEFENSE-SPACE-NONPRO-IRAN.html.

6 For an unusually detailed description of the April 2009 meeting, see Bonnie Glaser, ‘Chock-full of Dialogue: SED, Human Rights, and Security’, Comparative Connections, July 2008, http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/0802qus_china.pdf.

7 Secretary Gates notes that he found the Shangri-La Dialogue ‘a good opportunity to do a lot of bilateral business’, noting that he was able to use a 2010 speech to engage with Chinese officials after Beijing withdrew an invitation to protest arms sales to China. Gates, Duty, p. 145.

8 Michael Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 101.

9 On differing Chinese and American views of no-first-use, see Gregory Kulacki and Jeffrey Lewis, ‘No First Use in Sino-American Dialogue: Dilemma and Solution’, Foreign Affairs Review, vol. 29, no. 5, May 2012.

10 This was a thought experiment. The US had neither a force of uniform 1mt bombs nor target cities as such.

11 Administration's Missile Defense Program and the ABM Treaty, Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 24 July 2001.

12 William J. Perry, Brent Scowcroft and Charles D. Ferguson, ‘US Nuclear Weapons Policy’, Independent Task Force Report No. 62, Council on Foreign Relations, 2009, p. 4, http://www.cfr.org/proliferation/uzsz-nuclear-weapons-policy/p19226.

13 The 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, leaked portions of which identified a conflict with China as an ‘immediate contingency’ that helped determine the US number of nuclear weapons on day-to-day alert, was conflated with the National Security Strategy and its emphasis on pre-emption, creating a public impression of bellicosity that officials would struggle to counteract during Bush's term in office.

14 ‘Nuclear Weapons and U.S.–China Relations: A Way Forward’, CSIS, March 2013, pp. 19–20, http://csis.org/files/publication/130307_Colby_USChinaNuclear_Web.pdf.

15 De Gaulle's remark is often quoted but seldom cited, with any number of cities involved in the hypothetical exchange: Chicago for Lyon, New York for Paris, Hamburg or Bonn. It may be that de Gaulle was fond of making the comparison. He certainly made it at least twice during the 1961 Berlin Crisis, once directly to President Kennedy and again to members of Congress. See Document 30, ‘President's Visit, Memorandum of Conversation (US/MC/1), Paris, 31 May 1961’, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume XIV, ‘Berlin Crisis, 1961–1962’, and Memorandum of Conversation with the President and the Congressional Leadership, 6 June [Briefing on President Kennedy's European Trip], Memorandum of Conversation, 7 June 1961’, p. 1.

16 Milton Leitenberg, ‘Memorandum of Conversation with Charles Freeman’, Jr., 9 October 1996 (unpublished account).

17 Gates, Duty, p. 408.

18 Construction of commercial power reactors, for example, usually takes about 50 months from first concrete to fuel loading. Additional time would be required to modify a design for plutonium production, as well as the time necessary to produce and separate the plutonium. On commercial construction timelines, see ‘Nuclear Power in China’, World Nuclear Association, April 2014, http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-A-F/China--Nuclear-Power/.

19 It is worth noting that were China to undertake a sprint to parity for the purpose of undermining the credibility of US security guarantees in Asia, it would have to do so publicly to achieve the desired effect. I am indebted to Werner Merkwürdigliebe for this point.

20 For example, one exercise is described in Dong Jushan and Wu Xudong, ‘Build New China's Shield of Peace’, Beijing Zhongguo Qingnian Bao, 1 July 2001.

21 Scott D. Sagan, ‘Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management’, International Security, vol. 9, no. 4, Spring 1985, p. 136.