[The Chinese government appears to have an exaggerated view of the Thaad radar’s abilities, two experts, Jaganath Sankaran and Bryan L. Fearey, wrote in a recent paper. That radar is often said to have a range of about 620 miles. Some Chinese experts say its reach could be much farther.]
By Chris Buckley
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A Terminal High Altitude
Area Defense interceptor was successfully
tested at an undisclosed
location in the United States in 2013.
Credit Ralph Scott/United
States Department of Defense
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BEIJING
— Mao Zedong famously
dismissed the atomic bomb as a “paper tiger,” able to kill and terrify, but not
decisive in war. Even so, China built a nuclear arsenal of its own, and now
concerns about the effectiveness of that arsenal as a deterrent are driving it
into confrontation with the United States over an antimissile system being
built in South Korea. Here’s an explanation of why.
How
big is China’s nuclear arsenal?
China conducted its first nuclear test in
1964, and has developed a stable of nuclear missiles. But it is not a big
stable, compared with the thousands of warheads held by the United States and
Russia.
China does not reveal the size of its nuclear
forces. It has about 260 nuclear warheads that could be put on missiles, and by
the Pentagon’s latest estimate, China has between 75 and 100 intercontinental
ballistic missiles. Some estimates are lower, and one recent assessment said 40
to 50 of China’s ballistic missiles could reach the continental United States.
The United States has deployed about 1,370
nuclear warheads and has stockpiled more than 6,500, and has submarines and
aircraft able to launch nuclear weapons.
China has also built several submarines that
can launch nuclear missiles. But even its latest-model submarine “is noisy and
quite vulnerable to anti-submarine warfare,” and therefore is not a very potent
addition to its nuclear deterrent, M. Taylor Fravel, a professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Fiona S. Cunningham, a graduate
student there, who recently published an assessment of China’s nuclear
modernization, said by email.
China has also been upgrading some of its
missiles so that several nuclear warheads can be placed on a single missile
that then unleashes them on different targets.
China has had the ability to put multiple
warheads on missiles since the 1990s, but seems to have done so only recently,
when some missiles were installed with three or four warheads, said Jeffrey
Lewis, an expert on China’s nuclear forces at the Middlebury Institute of
International Studies. This showed how China has been cautious in playing
catch-up to the United States, he said.
“I don’t think that the Chinese and U.S.
have, historically, experienced the kind of tit-for-tat modernization that we
saw during the U.S.-Soviet arms race,” Mr. Lewis said. “The Chinese more or
less modernized for their own reasons and according to their own ideas.”
Why
has China’s nuclear arsenal stayed relatively small?
By the time China joined the nuclear club,
the United States and Russia were already well ahead in building a stockpile of
weapons. Mao decided to stick to a relatively small arsenal big enough to serve
as a deterrent, and that decision was made a fait accompli by the political
turmoil of Mao’s era, which held back the nuclear weapons program.
“China’s leaders thought that the important
thing was to master the technology,” Mr. Lewis said. “While the United States
did fine calculations of the deterrence balance, Chinese leaders tended to
think of deterrence like a checklist of achievements.”
Ever since, Chinese nuclear doctrine has
stuck to the idea of a “minimum means of reprisal,” with a force designed to
survive and retaliate after an initial nuclear attack. Alongside that, China
has a nuclear “no first use” policy: that it will not be the first to launch
nuclear weapons against another nuclear foe, and that it will not use its
nuclear weapons against a country without nuclear weapons.
Even so, China has been expanding and
upgrading its nuclear forces, and that modernization may speed up if the
government feels that it is falling too far behind the United States.
“China is probably confident in its ability
to be able to retaliate, but given the size and sophistication of U.S. nuclear
forces and the steady development of ballistic missile defenses, coupled with
China’s small nuclear arsenal, the margin for error is thin,” Mr. Fravel and
Ms. Cunningham said.
Why
does China fear the antimissile system?
The Chinese government worries that the
American antimissile system, called the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or
Thaad, could erode its nuclear deterrent — its ability to scare off potential
foes from ever considering a nuclear attack.
Its chief worry is not that Thaad could take down
missiles: the system offers a canopy of potential protection over South Korea,
but does not have the reach to bring down China’s intercontinental ballistic
missiles. Instead, China’s complaint is focused on Thaad’s radar system, which
Chinese experts have said could be used to track the People’s Liberation Army’s
missile forces.
Deploying Thaad’s current radar system “would
undermine China’s nuclear deterrence by collecting important data on Chinese
nuclear warheads,” Li Bin, a nuclear weapons expert at Tsinghua University in
Beijing, wrote last week.
He and other Chinese experts say the radar
could identify which Chinese missiles are carrying decoy warheads intended to
outfox foes. That would be like being able to see what cards China holds in a
nuclear poker game, and that could weaken China’s deterrent, they say.
“For China this is a very important point,
because its missiles are limited in number to begin with,” Wu Riqiang, a
nuclear expert at Renmin University in Beijing. That meant, he said, “China
could lose its nuclear retaliatory capacity.”
For China, it does not matter that the
American and South Korean governments have said Thaad is meant only to foil
North Korean missiles. Mr. Wu said.
“What we worry about is the ability. It
doesn’t matter to us whether the United States says this is aimed at North
Korea or China,” Mr. Wu said. “If there’s this ability, then China must worry.”
Are
China’s fears justified?
Chinese experts are nearly unanimous in
supporting Beijing’s criticisms. But quite a few foreign experts say those
fears are overstated or unfounded. The United States already has access to
radar systems in Qatar and Taiwan able to peer at China’s missile tests, and
Japan has two radar systems just like the one used for Thaad, Mr. Lewis said.
“I don’t see the deployment of Thaad in South
Korea as a significant improvement in the ability of the U.S. to monitor
Chinese missile tests,” he said.
The Chinese government appears to have an exaggerated
view of the Thaad radar’s abilities, two experts, Jaganath Sankaran and Bryan
L. Fearey, wrote in a recent paper. That radar is often said to have a range of
about 620 miles. Some Chinese experts say its reach could be much farther.
But in practice the range could be much lower
and “not possess the ability to track Chinese strategic missile
warheads/decoys,” Mr. Sankaran and Mr. Fearey wrote. “The Thaad radar simply
cannot cover the entire or even a substantial part of the Chinese mainland.”
Even so, China’s real, underlying worry
appears to be that Thaad could open the door to a much wider, more advanced
fence of antimissile systems arrayed around it by America’s allies, several
experts said. That would magnify Chinese worries about the effectiveness of its
nuclear deterrent, and entrench Chinese fears of encirclement by a coalition
knit together by a shared antimissile system.
“I think this is what really worries them,
because then what you have is the basis for a common interoperable system,”
said Michael J. Green, the former senior director for Asia in the National
Security Council under President George W. Bush. “I think it’s more about the
creation of a virtual collective security system,” he said of China’s worries
about Thaad.
Will
China alter its nuclear policy in response to Thaad?
Last week, the Global Times, a stridently
nationalist Chinese newspaper, warned in an editorial that China could consider
abandoning its “no first use” policy if Thaad leads to other antimissile
systems deemed threatening to China.
But for now at least such threats are
bluster, said many experts. China is far from taking a dramatic step like
abandoning its bedrock nuclear policy, they said.
“I don’t see ‘no first use’ going soon — at
least most responsible officers and officials stick to the policy, despite
ongoing debate behind the scenes,” said Douglas H. Paal, a China expert who
worked on the National Security Council under Presidents Ronald Reagan and
George Bush.
Instead, China is likely to respond by spending
more on its nuclear, missile and antimissile forces “to ensure survivability of
a second-strike force, and expanded penetration aids and decoys to defeat U.S.
missile defenses in the event of a second strike,” Mr. Paal said.
In the shorter term, China may accelerate the
introduction of a new generation of missiles, the Dongfeng-41, which can be
moved around on roads and will also be able to carry multiple warheads, said
Mr. Fravel and Ms. Cunningham.
China is also working on a “glide technology
to alter the trajectory of a warhead as it nears its target, which could be
used to overcome U.S. missile defenses in the long term,” they said.
Adam Wu contributed reporting from Beijing.
