[Now, however, President Xi Jinping appears to have altered course, at the same moment that he is building military airfields on disputed islands in the South China Sea, declaring exclusive Chinese “air defense identification zones,” sending Chinese submarines through the Persian Gulf for the first time and creating a powerful new arsenal of cyberweapons.]
By David E. Sanger and William J. Broad
 |
| @ The New York Times |
WASHINGTON — After
decades of maintaining a minimal nuclear force,China has
re-engineered many of its long-range ballistic missiles to carry multiple
warheads, a step that federal officials and policy analysts say appears
designed to give pause to the United States as it prepares to deploy more
robust missile defenses in the Pacific.
What makes China’s decision particularly
notable is that the technology of miniaturizing warheads and putting three or
more atop a single missile has been in Chinese hands for decades. But a
succession of Chinese leaders deliberately let it sit unused; they were not
interested in getting into the kind of arms race that characterized the Cold
War nuclear competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Now, however, President Xi Jinping appears
to have altered course, at the same moment that he is building military
airfields on disputed islands in the South China Sea, declaring exclusive
Chinese “air defense identification zones,” sending Chinese submarines through
the Persian Gulf for the first time and creating a powerful new arsenal of
cyberweapons.
Many of those steps have taken American
officials by surprise and have become evidence of the challenge the Obama
administration faces in dealing with China, in particular after American
intelligence agencies had predicted that Mr. Xi would focus on economic
development and follow the path of his predecessor, who advocated the country’s
“peaceful rise.”
Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in
Beijing on Saturday to discuss a variety of security and economic issues of
concern to the United States, although it remained unclear whether this
development with the missiles, which officials describe as recent, was on his
agenda.
American officials say that, so far, China has
declined to engage in talks on the decision to begin deploying multiple nuclear
warheads atop its ballistic missiles.
“The United States would like to have a
discussion of the broader issues of nuclear modernization and ballistic missile
defense with China,” saidPhillip C. Saunders,
director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at National
Defense University, a Pentagon-funded academic institution attended by many of
the military’s next cadre of senior commanders.
“The Chinese have been reluctant to have that
discussion in official channels,” Mr. Saunders said, although he and other
experts have engaged in unofficial conversations with their Chinese
counterparts on the warhead issue.
Beijing’s new nuclear program was reported
deep inside the annual Pentagon report to
Congress about Chinese military capabilities, disclosing a development that
poses a dilemma for the Obama administration, which has never talked publicly
about these Chinese nuclear advances.
President Obama is under more pressure than
ever to deploy missile defense systems in the Pacific, although American policy
officially states that those interceptors are to counter North Korea, not
China. At the same time, the president is trying to find a way to signal that
he will resist Chinese efforts to intimidate its neighbors, including some of
Washington’s closest allies, and to keep the United States out of the Western
Pacific.
Already, there is talk in the Pentagon of
speeding up the missile defense effort and of sending military ships into
international waters near the disputed islands, to make it clear that the
United States will insist on free navigation even in areas that China is
claiming as its exclusive zone.
Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear
Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a policy research
group in Washington, called the new deployments of Chinese warheads “a bad day
for nuclear constraint.”
“China’s little force is slowly getting a
little bigger,” he said, “and its limited capabilities are slowly getting a
little better.”
To American officials, the Chinese move fits
into a rapid transformation of their strategy under Mr. Xi, now considered one
of the most powerful leaders since Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping. Vivid
photographs, which were released recently, of Chinese efforts to reclaim land
on disputed islands in the South China Sea and immediately build airfields on
them, underscored for White House policy makers and military planners the speed
and intensity of Mr. Xi’s determination to push potential competitors out into
the mid-Pacific.
That has involved building aircraft carriers
and submarines to create an overall force that could pose a credible challenge
to the United States in the event of a regional crisis. Some of China’s
military modernization program has been aimed directly at America’s
technological advantage. China has sought technologies to block American
surveillance and communications satellites, and its major investments in
cybertechnology — and probes and attacks on American computer networks — are
viewed by American officials as a way to both steal intellectual property and
prepare for future conflict.
The upgrade to the nuclear forces fits into
that strategy.
“This is obviously part of an effort to
prepare for long-term competition with the United States,” said Ashley J. Tellis, a senior associate at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who was a senior national security
official in the George W. Bush administration. “The Chinese are always fearful
of American nuclear advantage.”
American nuclear forces today outnumber
China’s by eight to one. The choice of which nuclear missiles to upgrade was
notable, Mr. Tellis said, because China chose “one of few that can
unambiguously reach the United States.”
The United States pioneered multiple warheads
early in the Cold War. The move was more threatening than simply adding arms.
In theory, one missile could release warheads that adjusted their flight paths
so each zoomed toward a different target.
The term for the technical advance — multiple
independently targetable re-entry vehicle, or MIRV — became one of the Cold
War’s most dreaded fixtures. It embodied the horrors of overkill and
unthinkable slaughter. Each re-entry vehicle was a miniaturized hydrogen bomb.
Each, by definition, was many times more destructive than the crude atomic
weapon that leveled Hiroshima.
China watched all this from the sidelines.
Gingerly, it improved its warheads and missile forces in what amounted to baby
steps, but chose to field a force that the leadership in Beijing believed could
deter aggression with the smallest number of deployed warheads.
In 1999, during the Clinton administration,
Republicans in Congress charged that Chinese spies had stolen the secrets of
H-bomb miniaturization. But intelligence agencies noted Beijing’s restraint.
“For 20 years,” the C.I.A. reported, “China has had the technical
capability to develop” missiles with multiple warheads and could, if so
desired, upgrade its missile forces with MIRVs “in a few years.”
The calculus shifted in 2004, when the Bush
administration began deploying a ground-based antimissile system in Alaska and
California. Early in 2013, the Obama administration, worrying about North
Korean nuclear advances, ordered an upgrade. It called for the interceptors to
increase in number to 44 from 30.
While administration officials emphasized that
Chinese missiles were not in the system’s cross hairs, they acknowledged that
the growing number of interceptors might shatter at least some of Beijing’s
warheads.
Today, analysts see China’s addition of
multiple warheads as at least partly a response to Washington’s antimissile
strides. “They’re doing it,” Mr. Kristensen of the Federation of American
Scientists said, “to make sure they could get through the ballistic missile
defenses.”
The Pentagon report, released on May 8, said
that Beijing’s most powerful weapon now bore MIRV warheads. The
intercontinental ballistic missile is known as the DF-5 (for Dong Feng, or East
Wind). The Pentagon has said that China has about 20 in underground silos.
Private analysts said each upgraded DF-5 had
probably received three warheads and that the advances might span half the
missile force. If so, the number of warheads China can fire from that weapon at
the United States has increased to about 40 from 20.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on Chinese nuclear
forces at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. In an
interview, he emphasized that even fewer of the DF-5s might have received the
upgrade.
Early last week, Mr. Kristensen posted a public
report on the missile intelligence.
Beijing’s new membership in “the MIRV club,”
he said, “strains the credibility of China’s official assurance that it only
wants a minimum nuclear deterrent and is not part of a nuclear arms race.”
