The Real Challenge of China’s Nuclear Modernization

Abstract

For more than a decade, China’s military modernization has cast a shadow across the Indo-Pacific. For instance, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has fielded a variety of missiles and aircraft that have heightened the vulnerability of the United States, its allies, and its partners to conventional precision strikes. Moreover, an expanding fleet of surface vessels, amphibious platforms, and submarines could eventually provide Beijing with the ability to seize territory it covets and sustain military operations far beyond its neighborhood. These and other investments have not only raised questions about Washington’s ability to deter the use of force against frontline states, but also created doubts whether the United States could defeat an assault if deterrence were to fail. Until recently, however, few observers expressed serious worries about Beijing’s nuclear forces. Although China has made slow and steady improvements to its strategic deterrent over the years, those improvements have not made it a nuclear peer of the United States and Russia, nor have they even erased concerns that China’s arsenal might be susceptible to a first strike. That situation, however, is starting to change. It now appears that China is engaged in a significant quantitative and qualitative nuclear buildup. According to the Pentagon’s most recent China military power report, Beijing is working “to modernize, diversify, and expand its nuclear