U.S. President Donald Trump said last month he wants to open nuclear arms control talks with China and Russia. In the past, China has resisted a trilateral approach -- a hesitancy that has some logic to it given China's nuclear arsenal is dwarfed in comparison with the U.S. and Russia. While it's likely true that U.S. pressure to end the Russia-Ukraine War is fostering some concern about Washington's security commitments across the Asia-Pacific, all concerned will benefit from greater focus on easing regional nuclear tensions.
The disparity between U.S. and Chinese nuclear arsenals has indeed led China to build more nuclear weapons and even construct an enormous military headquarters near Beijing that will be 10 times the size of the Pentagon, complete with deep underground units built to withstand nuclear strikes. Despite Beijing's anxiety, Trump has some realistic options to defuse the nuclear rivalry.
Could a flare-up over Taiwan, or even some disputed reef in the South China Sea, escalate into a nuclear war? Unfortunately, the answer is yes, and the prospects for such a war are increasing.
China's regional ambitions and its rapid nuclear weapons buildup are partly to blame. But so are myriad U.S. foreign policy and defense signals.
The U.S. Department of Defense's annual report on Chinese military power, which came out back in December, says that the Chinese already had 600 operational nuclear warheads and are "on track to exceed previous projections." China is busy filling out 320 new silos, including with multi-megaton intercontinental ballistic missiles. Chinese navy submarines are apparently capable of hitting American targets from launch "bastions" off the China coast. Most troubling is that China is likely developing "low-yield weapons" so that it has options in a limited nuclear war.
During a trip to China in 2023, I asked a group of Chinese nuclear strategists if Beijing was studying "limited nuclear war," and they answered with surprising candor in the affirmative. When asked why, they answered, "You Americans are talking about it, so we must study it too."
Given all the ink spilled in Washington over the putative "China threat" over the last two decades, it's not surprising that China is determined to build up its nuclear arsenal. Chinese strategists certainly took notice when the novel "2034" was published a few years ago by an influential retired U.S. military leader that depicts a U.S.-China war that ends with a nuclear exchange.
A leading Chinese nuclear strategist, Hu Gaochen, wrote an influential article in 2021, explaining that Beijing needs to counter Washington's "strategic opportunism" by undertaking a substantial nuclear forces buildup.
Unfortunately, equally grave and perhaps even more bellicose signals have been issuing from Washington in the last few years. In a 2023 report for the Atlantic Council, political scientist Matthew Kroenig stated that due to growing Chinese conventional superiority across the Taiwan Strait, "the United States might choose to use nuclear weapons against the Chinese invasion force."
In the same piece, Kroenig called for "formally extending the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Taiwan" and even suggested the U.S. might have to target parts of Taiwan itself with nuclear weapons in the event of a conflict.
Another report from the same Washington think tank made the newly fashionable case for the need to prepare for nuclear war in the Taiwan Strait. Notably, this analysis was careful to suggest that China was more likely to resort to nuclear first use in a Taiwan scenario "if China's leadership believes there is a marked asymmetry of stakes favoring China."
Putting aside the reality that the Chinese care more about Taiwan than Americans ever will, the author, Greg Weaver, former principal adviser to the Joint Chiefs on nuclear strategy issues, brazenly asserts: "Taiwan is not Ukraine. ... The U.S. and allied stake in the outcome of a Taiwan conflict is high enough for them to risk nuclear escalation and high enough to persevere through limited nuclear exchanges." Weaver says that Chinese landing forces could form "the best possible conventional force target for nuclear attack" and seems all too oblivious to the escalation risks of such a step.
A
mid-2024 wargame report by the influential Center for New American
Security kept this momentum going by calling for a buildup of "theater
nuclear capabilities, stating that "To avoid a general nuclear war, U.S.
leaders may need to create substantial escalatory pressures to manage
the conflict.". The study agrees with the Weaver analysis in suggesting
that the Western Pacific had geography amenable to the use of tactical
nuclear weapons with "little collateral damage." However, it at least
soberly notes that "multiple Blue [i.e. Western] players voiced their
view that U.S. interests in Taiwan were not worth the risk of an in-kind
[nuclear] response."
It is plain that nuclear tensions are rising in the U.S.-China relationship, and easing these tensions will not be easy. Right now, hawkish rhetoric from Washington is making the situation worse. Even as leaders in the Asia-Pacific consider the viability of Washington's "nuclear umbrella" going forward, the focus should still continue to be on lowering nuclear risks in the most volatile scenarios, including especially pertaining to Taiwan.
Here are a couple of near-term and hopefully more sober recommendations to ease nuclear tensions. First, the U.S. side, which still has vast numerical and qualitative nuclear superiority, should get the ball rolling by adopting a no-first-use policy and returning to a strict interpretation of the One China policy. Concerning Taiwan, the effort to reach a compromise suffered another setback recently when the State Department in February altered more cautious language, regrettably. If Washington could take such steps to mitigate rivalry, Beijing could then reciprocate such conciliatory steps by scaling back its pattern of military exercises near Taiwan.
In addition, both sides should agree to an annual three-day bilateral summit to discuss the all-important nuclear issue. Any chance of nuclear war must be reined in as we stand at the precipice of disaster.