[The Pentagon thinks Beijing may
build 1,000 or more weapons by 2030. But it’s the new technologies that worry
strategists.]
By David E. Sanger and William J. Broad
And Chinese officials have
consistently rejected the idea of entering arms control talks, shutting down
such suggestions by noting — accurately — that the United States and Russia
each have deployed five times more nuclear warheads than Beijing possesses.
President Biden is seeking to
change all that.
For the first time, the United
States is trying to nudge China’s leadership into a conversation about its
nuclear capability. U.S. officials, describing the American strategy, say Mr.
Biden and his top aides plan to move slowly — focusing the talks first on
avoiding accidental conflict, then on each nation’s nuclear strategy and the
related instability that could come from attacks in cyberspace and outer space.
Finally — maybe years from now —
the two nations could begin discussing arms control, perhaps a treaty or
something politically less complex, such as an agreement on common norms of
behavior.
In Washington, the issue has taken
on more urgency than officials are acknowledging publicly, according to
officials who are involved. Mr. Biden’s aides are driven by concern that a new
arms race is heating up over hypersonic weapons, space arms and cyberweapons,
all of which could unleash a costly and destabilizing spiral of move and
countermove. The fear is that an attack that blinded space satellites or
command-and-control systems could quickly escalate, in ways that were not imaginable
in the nuclear competitions of the Cold War. China’s capabilities could also
pose a threat to President Biden’s hopes of reducing the role of nuclear
weapons in American defenses.
In some ways, Washington is focused
on the progress of China’s nuclear capability in a way that it has not
been since
Mao first tested a weapon in 1964.
In his virtual summit meeting
earlier this month with Xi Jinping, China’s president, who clearly has sought
to present himself as a epoch-defining leader alongside Mao, Mr. Biden raised
what the White House has euphemistically called “strategic stability talks.”
In interviews, Mr. Biden’s aides
have said the effort is a tentative first step toward a far larger agenda, akin
to the initial conversations about nuclear weapons that Russia and the United
States held in the 1950s. The starting goal, they insist, is to simply avoid
miscommunication and accidental war — even if it never rises to the level of a
nuclear threat.
“You will see at multiple levels an
intensification of the engagement to ensure that there are guardrails around
this competition,” Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, said
in a presentation at the Brookings Institution the day after the virtual
summit.
The nuclear relationship with
Russia, he noted, is “far more mature, has a much deeper history to it.” After
the summit meeting between Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi, he added, it is time to begin
such conversations with China. “It is now incumbent on us to think about the
most productive way to carry it forward,” he said.
In a sense, this is the revival of
an old fear in Washington: In 1964, Lyndon Johnson was so worried about the
rise of another nuclear rival that he considered, but ultimately rejected, plans to conduct a
pre-emptive strike or covert sabotage on China’s main nuclear testing
site at Lop Nor.
But China’s decision to maintain a
“minimum deterrent” for the past six decades — a nuclear force large enough to
assure that it could respond to a nuclear attack, but not nearly the size of
America’s or Russia’s — largely knocked its nuclear program off the Pentagon’s
list of top threats. Now, its recent moves, from building new missile silo
fields to testing new types of advanced weapons, come just as Mr. Biden’s aides
are deep into an examination of American nuclear strategy that will be
published in coming months.
The review, which every new
administration is required to undertake in its first year or so, will contain
key decisions — including whether to go ahead with a modernization plan that by
the last comprehensive estimate, four years ago, looked
likely to cost 1.2 trillion dollars over the next 30 years. The future
of those plans has been the subject of furious lobbying campaigns, especially
among the nation’s top defense contractors.
Earlier this month the
Pentagon concluded that the size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal may triple by
2030, to upward of 1,000 warheads. But the administration’s concern is
not just the number of weapons — it is the new technology, and particularly how
Chinese nuclear strategists are thinking about nontraditional arms.
When the Chinese launched a
hypersonic missile in July, circling the globe once and then deploying a
maneuverable glide vehicle that could zig and zag on an unpredictable path and
deliver a weapon anywhere on earth, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared
that the U.S. was “very close” to a “Sputnik moment.” But in the weeks
since, American officials have been reluctant to say what, exactly, about that
experiment so rattled them — beyond the fact that it revealed a technological
sophistication that they did not know the Chinese had achieved.
The hypersonic nature of the
missile — meaning it can move at more than five times the speed of sound — was
the least interesting element of the test. All nuclear missiles go at least
that fast. But the stubby glider it released — which could hold a nuclear
warhead — was designed to evade the United States’ primary missile
interceptors, which can operate only in outer space. (In recent weeks, the
Pentagon issued a contract for design work on technology to intercept the
gliders, but that would be years away.)
It’s unclear whether China plans to
deploy a hypersonic weapon in the future, and, even if it does, whether they
would be armed with nuclear warheads. But General Milley’s deputy, Gen. John
Hyten, who is retiring as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told reporters in October that the Chinese military
had conducted “hundreds” of hypersonic tests, compared with nine by the United
States.
General Hyten said the test,
combined with Beijing’s other moves, such as digging hundreds
of new silos for long-range missiles, suggest the Chinese government
may now be interested in developing a nuclear first-strike capability, not just
the minimum deterrent.
“Why are they building all of this
capability?” he asked on CBS News. While it is not clear what
Chinese strategists intend, he said, the hypersonic glide vehicle appears to be
“a first-use weapon.”
Inside the White House and the
Pentagon, there is no unanimity on that point. Mr. Biden has long been wary of
assessments that could be intended to drive up the Pentagon’s budget — and
certainly American defense contractors, their executive offices jammed with
former senior military officers, have a vested interest in describing a new
threat that could lead to billions of dollars in new investments.
But even some skeptics agree that
the Chinese hypersonic test, along
with antisatellite technologies that could blind American
early-warning and command-and-control systems, suggest a major rethinking of
American nuclear strategy and plans is overdue.
Gen. John Raymond, who commands the
newly created United States Space Force, recently told New York Times reporters
and editorial writers that in the case of a crisis, he has no direct channel
for communicating with his Chinese counterpart — a dangerous situation if, for
instance, an accidental collision with a Chinese spacecraft were to be
misperceived as an act of aggression.
That appeared to be at the core of
Mr. Sullivan’s first concern: establishing lines of communication between the
two militaries, of the kind the United States and Russia have had for decades.
(He avoided the use of the word “nuclear” in his talk, a reflection of how
space, cyberweapons and other high technologies need to be part of the
conversation, Mr. Biden’s senior aides say.)
On Capitol Hill, the conversation
so far is largely about matching the Chinese investment, rather than rethinking
the nature of the arms race.
“I’m very concerned,” Rose
Gottemoeller, an arms control official in several administrations who now
teaches at Stanford University, said in an interview. “What’s worrying me is
the automaticity of the actions — of more nuclear weapons and more missile
defenses without thinking if there’s a smarter way.”
Mr. Xi and Mr. Biden, American
officials said, agreed to further conversations — but there was no commitment
on how deep those would go. Asked whether the talks would include the topic of
arms control, the National Security Council, in a statement, said, “No. What we
are seeking — and what Jake Sullivan spoke about — are conversations with
empowered interlocutors” about “guardrails to reduce risk or the chance of
miscalculation.”
The history of those conversations
is not encouraging. For years, across several administrations, the United
States tried to get Chinese officials to talk about how they would secure nuclear
weapons in North Korea if the nation collapsed. The effort was to avoid a
collision among Chinese, South Korean and American forces seeking to find and
secure loose weapons. The Chinese have always demurred, perhaps for fear of
being caught talking about the possibility of the North’s collapse.
It is possible, many arms control
experts say, that the Chinese buildup is motivated by the deployment of U.S.
missile defenses in the Pacific — land-based systems in California, Alaska,
Guam and South Korea, and aboard ships patrolling off Japan and the Korean
Peninsula. The U.S. has always insisted that these systems are designed to
deter North Korea. But the Chinese government has long voiced worries that
North Korea’s nuclear program provides a convenient excuse for the United
States to build a system aimed at containing Chinese nuclear weapons.
China and the United States have
never engaged in a detailed discussion of missile defenses in the Pacific. But
the hypersonic test may force the issue, independent experts say, because it is
clear Beijing’s ambitions are expanding.
Even before the test, American
officials and military contractors were trying to figure out new defenses
against the hypersonic warheads. That would be more complex than intercepting
an intercontinental ballistic missile, a project that has already cost more
than $300 billion over several decades and yielded only episodic success. This
month, Raytheon, Northrop and Lockheed won Pentagon awards to compete with one another in
building an interceptor seen as agile enough to knock out a hypersonic glider.
The defensive weapon is billed as the first of its kind.
The Pentagon also has embarked on a
vast effort to loft up to 500 satellites that would provide improved means
of tracking ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles. The swarm is considered
crucial for establishing an end-to-end system that would identify hypersonic
attacks and direct interceptors onto flight paths that would let them destroy
the incoming gliders.
It all worries Ms. Gottemoeller,
who recently published a memoir of
negotiating the New Start treaty with Russia. “This action-reaction
cycle is in nobody’s interest,” she said. “We have to talk about how we’re
going to interrupt it.”
David E. Sanger is a White House
and national security correspondent. In a 38-year reporting career for The
Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently
in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book is “The Perfect Weapon:
War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age.” @SangerNYT • Facebook
William J. Broad is a science
journalist and senior writer. He joined The Times in 1983, and has shared two
Pulitzer Prizes with his colleagues, as well as an Emmy Award and a DuPont
Award. @WilliamJBroad