Carnegie’s Tong Zhao on the Expansion of China’s Nuclear Arsenal
Craving your next action-packed adventure?
Audible delivers thrills of every kind on your command, like Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, where a lone astronaut must save humanity from extinction, narrated with stunning intensity by Ray Porter. From electrifying suspense and daring quests to spine-tingling horror, romance, and far-off realms, unleash your adventurous side with gripping titles that’ll keep you guessing.
Discover exclusive Audible originals, hotly anticipated new releases, and must-listen bestsellers that hook you from the first minute. Because Audible knows there’s no greater thrill than the one that speaks to you. Discover what lies beyond the edge of your seat. Start your free 30-day trial at audible.com slash WonderyUS. That’s audible.com slash WonderyUS.
Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society.
Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Guo, coming to you today from Washington, D.C.
Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Seneca Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with the show, please consider lending your support.
You can get me at SenecaPod at gmail.com. And listeners, please support my work at www.sinecapodcast.com. Become a paying subscriber and enjoy, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, essays from me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your favorite China-focused columnists and commentators. Do check out the page to see all that’s on offer and consider helping me out.
Be sure also to check out the new show, China Talking Points, now available on YouTube and streaming live every other week. I’ve spent the last couple of days here in Washington at the offices of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, participating in a two-day workshop on U.S.-China strategic communications around nuclear risk organized by Rethink Media.
It’s a topic that, frankly, gets surprisingly little attention, but really there’s no dimension of the U.S.-China relationship where genuine strategic empathy is more critical. It’s not just about putting ourselves in the other’s shoes, but really attempting real cognitive empathy, trying to honestly understand the full range of strategic, ideological, intellectual, and even emotional factors that shape the Chinese leadership’s thinking.
My guest today is someone who embodies this kind of disciplined grasp of adversary perceptions that Robert Jervis spent a career urging—the kind of security dilemma sensibility that calls not just for caution but for informed empathy.
Zhao Tung is a senior fellow in the nuclear policy program here at Carnegie and one of the most respected, probably the most widely respected voice here on China’s nuclear doctrine, on strategic thinking, and arms control posture.
Zhao Tung, thank you so much for making time to speak with me and for hosting me here in your office.
Lao Xiang, you’re also a Henanese like me, I just learned. It’s great to see you after following your work for so many years, Kaiser. It’s a great pleasure to be here. My honor is entirely mine.
Well, let’s jump right in. Let’s start maybe at the level of first principles, because I think this is really the first time I’ve talked about this on the program, so it’s such an authority.
What is China’s nuclear doctrine actually for? How do Chinese leaders think about the utility of nuclear weapons beyond deterrence?
Well, in fact, China has never provided a full set of explanations on its nuclear doctrine. There are a few key principles on how to approach nuclear issues, how to potentially employ nuclear weapons. Those were set decades ago by the first generation of Chinese paramount leaders: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, etc.
One of those major principles is China’s no-first-use policy. China commits to never being the first to use nuclear weapons under any conditions. Other than that, by maintaining a very small nuclear arsenal for decades, China has been wisely believed to have a so-called minimum nuclear deterrence strategy.
China sought to keep a very small nuclear arsenal, which is sufficient to absorb a nuclear first strike and to have enough nuclear weapons to survive. Then, China could use the small number of survived nuclear weapons to conduct an effective retaliation by imposing unacceptable damage to the U.S. homeland. So that is described by scholars as a minimum nuclear deterrence strategy. I think for a long time, it generally aligns with China’s nuclear thinking, even though the Chinese government has never explicitly called its nuclear doctrine a minimum nuclear deterrence. The only recent exception is one Chinese diplomat who used this term. But it’s hard to know whether that reflects the authoritative thinking of the entire Chinese system.
When we’re talking about the nuclear arsenal of China right now, a few years ago, I remember everyone said it was simply 200. It had been 200 for about as long as I can remember. But of course, and as we’ll be talking about, there’s been a significant increase in the number of deployable warheads.
Is that correct? Yes, that’s the other part about China’s nuclear doctrine that is confusing to many international observers. The size of the arsenal is growing rather quickly in recent years. As recent as 2019, the U.S. government assessed China to still have a little more than 200 nuclear weapons. And today, in 2025, the U.S. assessment is that China already has more than 600. So the number has almost tripled in just several years.
To be clear, is this individual warheads? Or is, I mean, for example, if there’s a MIRV, does that count as one weapon or is that multiple warheads? Yeah, in the U.S. government assessments, they are talking about the number of warheads, rather than missiles or delivery systems.
In your recent Asia policy piece, you argue that it’s actually internal political drivers—especially legitimacy narratives and Xi Jinping’s personal leadership style—that now really significantly shape China’s nuclear posture. Can you expand on that a bit? What do you mean by that? And how do you unpack these drivers that you assess?
The conventional wisdom is, you know, China’s nuclear modernization in past decades had mostly been driven by concerns about U.S. development of non-nuclear military capabilities that could undermine or threaten China’s nuclear deterrence. China has been particularly worried about U.S. homeland missile defense. As I said, the Chinese nuclear strategy is premised on U.S. massive first use of nuclear weapons on China. Under that scenario, only a small number of Chinese nuclear weapons will survive.
Therefore, even a limited scale of U.S. homeland missile defense could potentially deny the Chinese capability to retaliate. So, the concern about U.S. homeland missile defense has been a real driver of China’s long-term efforts to modernize. There are other similar concerns, including U.S. development of conventional precision strike weapons that could, in theory, also threaten some Chinese nuclear weapons, given their precision.
Cyber is another technology that worries China. The U.S. has this concept of left-of-launch missile defense, basically meaning the U.S. could use cyber and other non-kinetic ways to disable China’s nuclear command control system and prevent Chinese launch of nuclear retaliation. I think all those concerns are still there, but I don’t think they are the main driver of the recent nuclear buildup.
You don’t think those alone would have been sufficient to drive this nuclear buildup? Mostly because the U.S. improvement of homeland missile defense, conventional precision weapons, etc., has been taking place in a rather incremental and transparent manner. So those are longstanding concerns for Beijing, and Beijing has been prioritizing countermeasures like improving the penetrating capability of Chinese missiles to deal with those concerns.
I don’t think those developments could account for the very abrupt and massive buildup. Even for Chinese military researchers, before the Chinese buildup was publicly revealed, they had been saying that the U.S.-China nuclear deterrence was rather stable. They themselves were not concerned about the U.S. being able to disarm China. They didn’t anticipate any urgent need for China to massively strengthen its nuclear arsenal.
So, it looks like it was a result of a political mandate. It’s a top-down process. The political leaders appear to see a greater need for a larger arsenal. That need is not only unique to Xi Jinping. All previous Chinese paramount leaders have really stressed the political value of nuclear weapons. They have said it’s nuclear weapons that give China greater say in international affairs, contributing to China’s international status and making China better respected.
For Xi Jinping, I think that need for political acceptance and acknowledgment is only becoming more urgent because he felt early on in his tenure that, because of China’s successful development, the capability gap with the United States was going to be further closed. And he worried as a result, the United States would be bound to become more desperate and hostile to contain China, even trying to destabilize China and using issues like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang to cause trouble for China.
And I think because of this structural realist perspective, the belief that this changing power balance is going to lead to greater instability and greater hostility from the United States. Therefore, the best solution for China to address the growing problems between the two sides is to further facilitate this power transition to demonstrate stronger strategic capability, including nuclear weapons, to basically convince the United States that it’s futile to try to slow down China’s growth, to try to undermine bilateral stability, to try to force China to make concessions that would really harm China’s core national interests.
So it’s Chinese efforts to compel peaceful coexistence with the United States. Xi Jinping appears to really believe in such a broader coercive leverage conveyed by a larger nuclear arsenal. He pointed to the Russian example. He praised Russia for making the right decision to maintain a large nuclear arsenal despite the economic challenges facing Russia after the end of the Cold War.
The implication is that by demonstrating greater strategic military capability, i.e., nuclear weapons, China could make Western countries better respect China’s core interests. It’s not difficult to see how his case was pretty compelling and convincing to a domestic audience. I think that the problem, of course, is that there’s a circularity to it, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, that there’s a feedback loop: as he does this, then the efforts to contain China, in his view, would be more visible on the part of the United States.
So, yeah, that’s one of the unfortunate factors in arms racing. But how should we understand the symbolic role of nuclear weapons in the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, in Xi Jinping’s view, in that narrative? I mean, is it more about just simply China never again being in a position where it could be bullied? Is it, I mean, that it’s an essentially defensive role? Or is it one in which China can maybe act with more impunity in the world? Not that Beijing would ever say so out loud, if that were the case.
But if they are looking at the Russian example, I mean, Russia has been able to act without incurring as high a price as it might otherwise have, had it not been a very strong nuclear-armed state. You’ll note, of course, that NATO has refrained from putting troops on the ground in Ukraine. So has the United States.
So, defensive or offensive? Well, China certainly perceives this nuclear buildup as stabilizing, as driven by a defensive objective, because the Chinese perception is the United States is becoming more hostile. China is reacting to that, and China believes that nuclear expansion, among other measures, is helpful to contain this perceived American hostility.
That logic is easily understood by Chinese policy elites and the Chinese general public. That’s why Xi’s interest in a larger nuclear arsenal is not facing strong internal resistance. But it’s a different logic compared with a more military technical level consideration of how many nuclear weapons are sufficient for defending Chinese security interests.
The previous calculation was believed to be more tied to a very narrow goal of achieving secure second-strike capability, basically to calculate again how much damage an American first-strike disarming campaign against China might cause to the Chinese nuclear arsenal. Would China have enough weapons to survive? Would the survived nuclear weapons be able to penetrate U.S. missile defense and maybe eventually detonate over several U.S. cities to cause unacceptable damage?
Now, it’s very uncertain whether this military technical calculation is primarily driving the number of the arsenal. You’ve described, and I think just now you’ve given examples of how this manifests, a real erosion of institutionalized strategic debate in China.
What do we know about the current state of the internal nuclear decision-making? Clearly, the military technological people who you described as having made quite rational decisions are not being heard, or somehow their ideas have been sidelined, and we are instead feeling a sort of top-down decision-making. Explain to me how that came about, how do we know, does that have something to do with reorganization of the rocket force, or does it have anything to do with, what are the outward signs of this besides, that is to say, besides the final outcome, which is a buildup of the nuclear arsenal out of proportion to what these military technocrats might have otherwise called for?
What is the evidence that this is coming from the top?
Well, we probably shouldn’t make a categorical judgment about the Chinese nuclear buildup, because some elements of the buildup actually are supported by military strategies to serve a comparatively well-defined military objective.
For example, in recent years, China has been investing more in theater-range nuclear capabilities, especially the DF-26 ballistic missile, which is very precise and can deliver nuclear warheads against military facilities and could limit the collateral damage to civilians.
And that’s, I think, serving an increasing goal to help deter U.S. limited nuclear-first use against China in the regional war, such as over Taiwan.
Because if China can, if the U.S. threatens or actually uses these nuclear weapons in a very limited way in a regional war, China would be able to use these theater-range precision nuclear weapons to respond in kind or in proportion against U.S. regional military targets.
So that, I think, from China’s perspective would deter U.S. limited-first use, which previous Chinese nuclear capabilities wouldn’t be able to. Previously, China only maintained long-range, large-scale nuclear warheads that wouldn’t be suitable to respond in kind to a very limited, low-yield U.S. nuclear use.
Right. So now they’ve achieved better proportionality.
Right. They can do this.
So this part is, I think, increasingly discussed and analyzed by Chinese military strategists and serves a specific military goal.
But when it comes to China’s massive development of silo-based intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs), those capabilities don’t appear to serve any obvious military objective.
So that part appears to be more about demonstrating China’s strategic capability.
And the fact that China used to be very careful to hide its nuclear facilities’ locations. China has had silo-based ICBMs for decades, but they were built in the most mountainous areas.
China took great efforts to hide from the very beginning of the construction of the sites all the way to the entire operational lifetime of those facilities to make sure they would never be easily identified by U.S. satellites.
They would even build decoys, fake silos to confuse enemies, to increase the survivability of real silos.
But now they are just building more than 300 silos in plain sight in northwestern China and making it very easy for U.S. satellites to see the details.
So that appears to be more driven by a desire to actually publicly demonstrate capability.
The fact that China prioritized the construction of these large-scale ICBM silo sites is potentially because China is really good at large-scale infrastructure projects at reasonable cost.
So those capabilities can be built in a much shorter time compared with other types of nuclear weapons, nuclear submarines, and heavy bombers.
It also demonstrates a Chinese sense of urgency to display capability.
So is the upshot that we are seeing a de facto shift away from minimum deterrence?
I wouldn’t draw that conclusion yet.
I still haven’t seen any internal discussion about abandoning a nuclear deterrence strategy based on retaliation.
I haven’t seen a significant increase of interest within the military to actively plan for nuclear-first use.
The primary driver is still about how to deter American nuclear-first use.
But now they want to be able to deter not only massive-scale nuclear first strikes, but also limited nuclear use.
And you think the no-first-use pledge still is in force, that it sits comfortably enough with current Chinese political doctrine?
I mean, again, I don’t see evidence of China wanting to violate its no-first-use policy.
The mainstream perception in Beijing is still that despite China’s recent nuclear expansion, the U.S. enjoys an obvious advantage in the nuclear area.
It doesn’t make sense for China to want a conventional war to escalate into the nuclear domain.
That’s where the U.S. maintains obvious strengths and advantages.
But when it comes to no-first use, the story is always more nuanced.
I do think at the political level, China is generally sincere in making that commitment.
But again, it becomes more complicated when it comes to the operational details. But because rather authoritative Chinese military writings, including those approved by senior military officials, they talked about scenarios under which China would threaten nuclear-first use if certain critical targets are facing a conventional threat.
And of course, in their view, in Chinese military view, nuclear deterrence is more about making gestures of potential nuclear use to actually influence enemy behaviors, to deter them from taking actions that would threaten China rather than actually employing nuclear weapons.
So how to basically manipulate risk and therefore shape enemy behavior is a major part of China’s nuclear deterrence thinking. Their military writings reflect this; they leave the space for making nuclear threats in a conventional war to deter certain conventional threats.
According to this thinking, to do this wouldn’t necessarily violate China’s no-first-use policy. As long as China doesn’t follow through on the threat and actually employ nuclear weapons, they would say the no-first-use commitment has held.
But of course, this already introduces controversy into China’s no-first-use commitment because in a conventional crisis, China starts to threaten nuclear use, maybe not necessarily explicitly but implicitly and subtly by referring to China’s nuclear capability. Chinese leaders talk about China’s nuclear strengths, conducting nuclear exercises with nuclear-capable military platforms.
There are many ways to send those subtle messages and remind the enemy that a conventional war could escalate to the nuclear level. So China can do all of those things and achieve broader security and even geopolitical benefits. That’s exactly, I think, what Russia has done in Ukraine through Russian nuclear saber-rattling.
When you start making even implicit nuclear threats in a conventional war, your enemy has to treat your nuclear signaling as very serious, and they would have to consider there’s a real possibility of nuclear use.
To give yourself the space to threaten nuclear use, some would argue that this already violates the spirit of no-first-use and makes your enemy no longer trust the credibility of no-first-use. Thus, it undermines the reassuring benefit.
Is this debate happening inside of China? Is this a public debate that you’re hearing among nuclear strategists within China? Not really, because even those relatively authoritative military writings are so-called internal references.
I see. Nei bu cang kao. They are not classified documents, but they are supposed to be only for internal circulation. Before, about 10 to 15 years ago, when the political environment was relatively relaxed, foreign scholars could still go to the campus of the National Defense University or the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences. They could visit their stores on the campuses and buy those internal circulation books.
That’s how these documents already spread to foreign countries. But inside China, their circulation is very strictly limited. Many Chinese civilian officials, including senior diplomats in charge of arms control policies, are not aware of these military documents. They don’t know what is written inside. Even many Chinese nuclear experts do not have access to such documents, making it hard for them to have a debate.
Let’s talk about this essay you wrote in Foreign Affairs recently. You described China as seeing itself in a strategic stalemate with the United States. What does that mean in practical terms for Chinese military planners? What do you mean by strategic stalemate?
It’s just a term that I see an increasing number of Chinese foreign policy experts using. I think it reflects this increasingly internal agreement that when it comes to the comparison of comprehensive national power, China has achieved a qualitative change by significantly narrowing down the power gap to the point that China can now be roughly described as on the same level.
So it’s a synonym; stalemate is a synonym for parity. It’s a rough balance of power. The obvious question is, how has Trump’s second term, really since his inauguration, shaped Beijing’s calculus? Do you think that it has changed compared to the period 2017 to 2020?
I think it has reinforced the Chinese belief that China is now formally entering a new era of strategic balance or strategic stalemate with the United States. Trump has accelerated American decline, both regarding American material power because of his very problematic economic policies, tariffs, and so forth. And also the overall chaos in the U.S. government system that he introduced really undermines U.S. long-term power development compared with China.
And also, significant decline of U.S. soft power and international standing.
So, U.S. has much less moral leverage it can use against China.
The fact that by standing the ground and pushing back against U.S. tariff, that was perceived to have led to Trump’s concessions.
All of these together, I think, reinforce the Chinese perception that indeed China is increasing in a position to negotiate equally, from a position of strength.
Yeah, from maybe not strong, but at least equality.
To negotiate with dignity and resolution, China can win a fair agreement.
That’s the approach China should take.
I think this will influence not only China’s economic negotiating approach but also its overall foreign policy and security approach regarding the United States.
Should we understand this very rapid increase in China’s nuclear capabilities as a sign that its traditional strategic patience is now wearing thin, that it’s entering a period now of more strategic assertiveness?
Again, that’s not Chinese perception, right?
The Chinese self-perception is that what is causing increasing instability is growing American hostility.
By building up and demonstrating China’s strategic power, China is introducing greater stability into the relationship by making it harder for the United States to continue aggression and bullying against China.
So, that’s where the perception gap is.
Do you think that is a gap?
Do you think that that’s not well understood in the American strategic community?
Do you think that it’s now basically conventional wisdom that what we should see, what we should understand is that China is entering a period of more assertiveness?
I think it’s very valuable that you bring, as I said, I’m all about strategic empathy, and you are too.
This pervades all of your writing.
Clearly, you think that this is something where minds in Washington need to be changed, in the Pentagon need to be changed. They need to understand.
I think minds in both Beijing and Washington need to be changed.
On Washington’s part, some U.S. China experts have a more nuanced view about Chinese perception. They understand China has genuine grievances, and some of its behaviors are driven by a genuine sense of insecurity.
On Beijing’s part, even though there is a strong self-perception of China simply trying to defend its legitimate interests, China is trying to stabilize the bilateral relationship.
The other side of the country is, in the current Chinese system, its capacity to reflect critically on its own behavior and to adequately take into consideration other countries’ threat perceptions and concerns towards China is very limited.
Therefore, it’s hard to tell whether this growing capability would actually lead to more aggressive Chinese behavior.
Because China always sees everything it does as purely self-defensive and peaceful, driven by legitimate interests.
But it’s hard to say for sure that when China becomes more powerful, it would never adopt expansionist policies.
If China is able to secure Taiwan and such a sea with its growing military power, would China aim at a greater sphere of military influence or dominance after achieving its current territorial interests?
We simply don’t know.
We have seen signs of, for example, Chinese experts who are affiliated with the system, increasingly making discussions about that question, Japan’s sovereignty over Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands.
I can understand when China thinks Japan is picking troubles with China, this is an issue China can use to push back and teach Japan a lesson.
But when you start to hint at settled territorial disputes, it’s understandable some countries will think this trend will grow if China becomes more powerful going forward.
You just now mentioned Taiwan, which, of course, is the flashpoint that everyone is aware of and certainly is the most consequential flashpoint.
How real is the risk right now that China sees its moment to enact some kind of unification or reunification is slipping away?
And how might nuclear planning play into that sort of scenario?
I think the near-term risk is relatively low.
If we look at the official results of the Taiwan Work Conference that was conducted in February this year, also followed by the two sessions in March this year, which issued statements on Taiwan, among other things. The general policy direction, the direction set by these two high-level meetings was very clear: that is to continue the existing policy of incrementally influencing Chinese capability to control the direction of the cross-strait relationship, and focusing on peaceful measures to unify. There is a lot of continuity there.
On the military capability side, I think China still needs some more time to feel really ready to conduct massive operations if necessary. We have seen reported China’s construction of a really large-scale underground military command control facility in the southwestern part of Beijing that is multiple the size of the Pentagon. We have seen China building specially designed barges that can dock Chinese military ships and quickly transport soldiers and equipment to Taiwan without ports and other supporting facilities.
Those large military programs still need time to materialize and become operational. At the high senior leadership level, there is just so much internal instability within the military, the purging of senior generals, including officials from the eastern district. This will undermine China’s near-term capacity. So, I think China will want more time to be military ready. Of course, I am not saying the military option is a priority option for China, but simply to feel militarily ready if necessary will take some more time.
I think China wants to wait and see how the overall global geopolitical trend develops in the next few years.
- Will the U.S. become further isolated under Trump?
- Will the international community become more indifferent to the Taiwan issue?
- Would Western countries, in particular, continue to really depend on Taiwan as a key source of semiconductor products?
- How would international public opinion evolve regarding Taiwan and China?
I do think some strategists in Beijing see Trump as a special opportunity, given his apparent interest in avoiding massive military conflict with China or Russia, and his general lack of interest in sacrificing American blood and treasure on foreign soil that is not necessarily so existential to American interest.
There is also internal disagreement within the Pentagon about how important Taiwan is to American military interests in the region. We are seeing more and more people from prominent think tanks publishing papers that suggest, what was a few years ago quite unsayable: that Taiwan does not represent a vital strategic American interest and that it’s simply not worth it.
However, I think the risk of military conflict could grow, perhaps shortly before the ending of the second Trump administration. Even though China has been prioritizing peaceful means of promoting unification, the goal has become more ambitious. The previous emphasis was on countering or preventing independence. Now, the emphasis is more on promoting or advancing unification; of course, peaceful measures are prioritized.
But peaceful measures appear to include systematic efforts to expand Chinese influence in Taiwanese society. We have seen China working more and more with local organizations, political parties, civil society actors, and media organizations in Taiwan to promote China’s narrative, essentially making the case that to voluntarily unify is the least bad option for Taiwanese people. China has been handing out Chinese national IDs to some Taiwanese citizens, and even reportedly buying pledges of loyalty from actively serving Taiwanese military personnel.
For China to make peaceful unification work, it has to steadily increase its influence across Taiwanese society. However, I believe those measures will receive strong pushback. I’d like to ask you how you assess Taiwan’s countermeasures to this. There’s this 17-point anti-infiltration plan that you talked about in that Foreign Affairs piece. Do these actually deter Beijing or maybe prompt even sharper responses?
Unfortunately, they are leading to sharper responses because those countermeasures are viewed by Beijing as DPP governments resisting peaceful unification. Therefore, I think China has stepped up military operations near Taiwan as a result. This concern leads me to believe that even peaceful measures to promote unification could eventually lead to higher military tensions, potentially causing incidents or even military conflicts.
Let’s come back to nuclear strategy a little bit. And I want to talk about your arms control today essay, which introduces this idea of a dangerous parallax in how Washington and Beijing perceive one another in their nuclear doctrines. Can you walk us through what you mean by that? I’m not sure everyone knows what the word parallax actually means.
Some people are hopeful that under Trump, maybe the U.S.-China nuclear relationship can become more stable. Trump himself has repeatedly mentioned potentially having denuclearization talks with China. His interest in having direct leadership-to-leadership meetings and raising these high-stakes issues is the right approach to engage China since nuclear decisions are made by senior political leaders, especially Mr. Xi himself.
For Trump to want to have such high-level engagements directly is a more effective way than starting engagements with low-level bureaucrats. The problem is the mainstream American strategists, who are so concerned about China’s nuclear buildup. This is partially made worse by the lack of transparency on Beijing’s part. China has not offered any information about why it is building up, what endgame it seeks to achieve, how many more weapons it needs, and what the rationale behind the buildup is.
So we end up falling back on worst-case assumptions about all this. Indeed, the worst-case assumption includes speculation about perhaps Beijing wanting to achieve nuclear parity with the United States, or even worse, maybe Beijing wants to acquire the capability to disarm the United States, to be able to actively attack American nuclear weapons and neutralize American second-strike capability.
Many serious American military strategists believe that China has a plan to build thousands or more nuclear weapons in the next 10 to 15 years, making China a larger, more powerful nuclear state than the United States. Many are worried about China wanting to fundamentally change its nuclear doctrine to one that’s based on first use. The U.S. also worries that Russia and China might join hands in conducting a joint nuclear strike against the United States.
Or at least if the U.S. and Russia are already engaged in a nuclear war, maybe China might be tempted to conduct so-called opportunistic aggression by starting a second nuclear conflict with the United States. So the mainstream planning is increasingly driven by this worst-case scenario thinking.
We have seen a consensus being formed in Washington that the U.S. needs to reverse its decades of nuclear reduction and instead start enhancing American nuclear capability. I worry that this potential American nuclear increase could be interpreted by Beijing as American efforts to maintain its nuclear primacy or worse, actively undermine China’s nuclear deterrence and lead to China’s further reactions.
Yeah, we get into a very terrible and possibly apocalyptic feedback loop here. One where the erosion of expert consensus and institutional continuity might be read by Chinese leaders as instability or unreliability. It prompts the Chinese leaders to adopt more rigid strategic postures in response to that. In turn, those can reinforce the hawkish tendencies that we see already so abundant in Washington.
So that, yeah, that’s a very worrisome loop that we’re in. How do we break that? I mean, part of it you identified already if Beijing were more transparent about what it’s doing. And, of course, I think if both sides just tried to exercise a little more cognitive empathy, a little more strategic empathy toward one another.
Well, yeah, as you said, to start with, both sides need to develop more nuanced understandings about the other’s thinking. For Washington, it’s concern about China wanting a bigger arsenal than the United States. That’s far-fetched. China wanting to use nuclear weapons first is totally detached from internal Chinese discussion. I haven’t seen almost zero evidence of that happening.
On the Chinese side, there is also a strong reluctance to consider American concerns. China thinks all of its nuclear buildup is stabilizing, and the United States shouldn’t fear at all. But that’s not the case. The U.S. is genuinely concerned about this unprecedented situation of facing two nuclear near-peers, Russia and China, who have very close cooperation, including in military areas.
So, China also needs to be willing to consider American legitimate concerns and to start, therefore, explaining what its goal is. So far, that has not happened. Both sides, I think, can engage in more critical self-reflection and be more willing to take the other’s concerns into consideration. Let’s talk about the U.S. plans for anti-missile systems, for expansion of anti-missile, of missile defense systems, Trump’s Golden Dome, and other things like that.
How much do you think that China’s modernization efforts are tied to perceptions of American intentions that way? And again, how much of the thinking behind these more robust missile defense systems are tied to American thinking about Chinese intentions?
Well, you know, historically, China’s concern about U.S. homeland missile defense has been a major technical level driver of China’s modernization effort. But regarding Golden Dome, I think China’s views are more nuanced.
If we look at China’s public-facing announcements and statements and analysis, they are, as usual, very critical. The recent China-Russia joint statement on maintaining global strategic stability heavily criticizes Golden Dome, saying that it tries to delink strategic offensive weapons from strategic defensive weapons. So it tries to ignore the importance of limiting missile defense as a key precondition for nuclear arms control diplomacy.
It portrays Golden Dome as hugely destabilizing and threatening to global strategic stability. We have also seen Chinese experts repeating these arguments. But I think if you look deeper into China’s expert discussion internally, their views are much more nuanced, right?
They recognize this program was driven by Trump’s personal interest to emulate the success of Israel’s Iron Dome program to appear that Trump is protecting American people. But the entire decision-making process was very chaotic and not very coherent, especially the fact that Trump wants Golden Dome to become operational before the end of his term. That’s totally unrealistic.
The massive scope of the envisioned Golden Dome is going to be so challenging to become reality. Many of these key components, including space-based interceptors, won’t be able to intercept a large number of Russian or Chinese ICBM attacks. Even to defend against a couple of missile attacks from North Korea would require hundreds, if not thousands of space-based interceptors.
To defend against a larger scale attack from Russia and China would require a much larger scale of constellation. So that’s going to be astronomically expensive and technologically challenging, which is true for many non-kinetic missile defense technologies envisioned under this program. Many Chinese experts actually say that this is driven by a chaotic decision-making process, fueled by lobbying from special interest groups from the military defense complex.
It’s an ego-driven project that’s wholly unrealistic. And it’s so expensive it is going to compete with other U.S. defense priorities, including the U.S. nuclear modernization program. So I think China is not as worried today as before. They actually think this program could be very wasteful on the American side, making the U.S. less able to prioritize the most needed military capabilities.
It would be ironic if this update to Reagan’s Star Wars ended up helping to bankrupt America. Yeah, it could impose unnecessary costs on the American side. I’m actually very comforted in knowing that there’s such a nuanced understanding of it in the strategic community in Beijing. That’s very comforting.
You mentioned just now about the number of interceptors that would be necessary even to stop a limited attack by North Korea. So you wrote an essay recently, which I thought was really interesting, about the North Korea factor and the sort of Putin-Kim alliance and how that reads in Beijing. You look at the risks stemming from this growing closeness between Putin and Kim Jong-un.
Why is China so reluctant to play a more proactive role in constraining North Korea right now, though? I think one important factor is that North Korea is just a tough ally to manage. It’s so defiant.
I’ve likened them in the past to having a vicious dog in your backyard. It bites you, it bites the neighbors. But, you know, once in a while, it’ll help you defend against a home invasion. You want to kind of take it out back and shoot it. But it’s a pretty vicious thing. And it’s sometimes useful. But I feel like that’s Beijing’s attitude toward North Korea sometimes.
The horse has left the barn. North Korea is now fully nuclearized. It is immune from even an ally’s pressure. During the 2016-2017 period when China joined forces with the United States and other countries to roll out UN Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions on North Korea, North Korea was really pissed off and implicitly threatened China by hinting that its missiles could reach most parts of China. So it’s hard. I think for its own security interests, China is more and more reluctant to impose real pressure on North Korea. Even for Beijing to maintain its previous position on the eventual denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is now unacceptable to Pyongyang. That’s a major reason we have seen the cooling down of the bilateral relationship.
Pyongyang is actively pressuring Beijing to drop this longstanding position and to basically follow the Russian step. Because Russia has publicly accepted North Korea’s nuclear status, Russian senior officials have openly acknowledged that reality. So it’s North Korea that is now actively putting pressure on Beijing to change its position regarding North Korea’s nuclear weapon program.
You argue that China would, under certain circumstances, intervene if Kim Jong-un actually crosses certain red lines. What are those red lines, and how are they shifting in Beijing’s eyes? I think what I try to say in that essay is there are elements in North Korea, Newcastle, that are particularly worrisome for Beijing. I think Beijing is now really concerned about North Korea’s intercontinental-range ballistic missiles, which threaten the United States.
But North Korea is increasingly dependent on tactical nuclear weapon systems. It has developed a wide range of very diverse types of tactical nuclear weapons:
- Land-based
- Air-based
- Sea-based
Its nuclear doctrine clearly states that North Korea is ready to use those tactical nuclear weapons early on in a future conflict. And that conflict would be South Korea, across the 38th parallel.
That’s the assumption. South Korea, perhaps U.S. bases in South Korea and Japan. North Korea has forward-deployed some of these tactical systems closer to the inter-Korean border. At least the doctrine states it pre-delegates the launch authority of these tactical nuclear weapon systems to the relevant military units.
All of these factors would make China worry that the risk of North Korea deliberately or incidentally starting a nuclear conflict through the threat or use of tactical nuclear weapons is growing. This could drag China into a nuclear conflict on its doorstep. Thus, I think that’s the area of common interest between China and other regional countries.
China has been promoting some confidence-building and risk-reduction measures regarding nuclear weapons at an international level, including a no-first-use policy. China wants more nuclear weapons states to adopt no-first-use. This may be one area that China can coordinate with other countries to see if it can make North Korea adopt less destabilizing nuclear policies and make nuclear weapons less likely to be used on the Korean Peninsula.
Fantastic. If you had the opportunity to talk to a skeptical U.S. policymaker who sees China as enabling Pyongyang’s nuclear program, even though it insists that it supports denuclearization, how would you convince them? What would you say in evidence that Beijing can actually be induced into playing a more positive role?
Well, I think historically, China never wanted to deliberately assist North Korea’s nuclear program. But China, on the other hand, also didn’t want to stick its neck out to forcefully denuclearize North Korea. When there was still an opportunity to stop North Korea’s nuclear advancement through economic sanctions, it required Beijing to shoulder the cost of imposing that type of economic threat on North Korea.
We needed crippling economic sanctions on North Korea and to maintain that type of crippling sanctions long enough to destabilize North Korea’s economic and social system threatening its regime security. We needed that type of economic pressure. Beijing wasn’t willing to go that far. It didn’t feel it could threaten North Korea to that level because it worries about its own security interests and its influence over the Korean Peninsula.
Beijing has been more sympathetic to North Korea’s perceived need for a strategic deterrent. It also shared, to some extent, North Korea’s concern about the United States and its Western allies. For all these reasons, from Western countries’ perspective, Beijing didn’t cooperate enough and therefore contributed to the failure of the international community to stop North Korea.
But today, I just don’t see a strong Chinese political will to, again, put its own interests on the line in order to force North Korea to change its nuclear decision.
Right. And how do you see Beijing in terms of the pressure it might put on Moscow to curb its newfound ally, North Korea? I mean, there’s been a lot of pressure over North Korean soldiers fighting in Ukraine, for example, and other things.
Is there a way that Beijing could be brought onto the side of NATO, the EU, and the United States on the Ukraine conflict, at least in terms of curbing North Korean participation? I’m not sure how worried Beijing is about North Korean troops in Ukraine. In fact, closer cooperation or mutual cooperation between Russia and North Korea helped to reduce the Chinese burden.
China didn’t need to directly support Russia in Ukraine. And China didn’t need to directly support North Korea. Russia can provide, could provide North Korea with more economic aid, and North Korea can help out Russia. So it reduces the Chinese burden to get involved in sensitive areas to directly support its two allies.
But of course, China has its concerns regarding Russian-North Korea cooperation. I think, especially over potential Russian sharing of sensitive military technologies with North Korea, that could, depending on how far Russia is willing to go to help North Korea with its development of nuclear and missile capabilities, that Russian cooperation could undermine international norms on non-proliferation, in which China still has a strong interest.
China also worries that South Korea and Japan might become more worried about North Korea’s improving strategic capabilities. And that concern has driven more and more internal discussions in Seoul and Tokyo for indigenous deterrent capabilities. South Korea, if not for the election of a progressive president, could have a real chance of pursuing its own nuclear capability.
So, China worries about all the spillover effects on its own security because of Russia-North Korea cooperation that strengthened North Korea’s military capability. North Korean troops in Eastern Europe make European countries create a linkage between European security and Asia-Pacific security.
From China’s perspective, it gives European countries the excuse to strengthen their military presence in the Asia-Pacific region to talk about a NATO mission for Asia.
I’ve been talking to Zhao Tong, who is a senior fellow in the nuclear policy program here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. What a fantastic mind of information you are, and you present your knowledge so clearly, and it’s really admirable. I look forward to talking to you again about this because this is certainly not the end of—we’ve not exhausted the issue of the nuclear situation.
Let’s move on now, and first to our segment called Paying It Forward, where I’d like you to identify just somebody who’s working preferably in your field, another researcher maybe doing work on arms control or on the nuclear issue, who we should be paying attention to.
Well, when I was at Carnegie Tsinghua Center in Beijing, I worked with a young scholar, David Logan, who was a young ambassador at Carnegie Tsinghua Center, and he is now really a rising star in the field of nuclear deterrence, arms control, and non-proliferation. He has done very impressive work on China’s nuclear policy, looking deeply into the PLA organization’s structure of the rocket force, and also conducting public opinion surveys in China about how the Chinese general public thinks about nuclear weapon issues, which is a very interesting research topic.
David Logan, I will make sure to check out his work. Yeah, he’s now a professor at the Fletcher School of Tufts University. Great recommendation.
And what about a recommendation? Do you have a book or a film or some music or something that you would like to recommend for our listeners? It doesn’t even have to be about China, let alone nuclear arms racing.
Yeah, I happen to be watching the American TV series Yellowstone, which tells the story of a ranch owner in Montana trying to protect his ranch. I think it’s interesting for our conversation because it demonstrates some of the mindset of some American people who see there are just bad people in the world and they see the need to use all means available to defeat these bad people, including killing them.
I think that mindset is really telling because right now I’m afraid an increasing number of American strategists start to see China as just a bad actor, and they are increasingly disillusioned about resolving U.S.-China disagreements through persuasion, talks, and diplomacy. They are losing hope that they can ever change Chinese thinking or behavior.
So it’s really dangerous when both sides—I think a similar sentiment is also growing in Beijing towards Washington. When Beijing thinks the U.S. is never going to change its view about the Chinese regime, it will preserve its own hegemony at all costs. Right. It contributes to the both sides’ determination to outcompete and win over the other side, and legitimizing the use of unlimited measures.
And you get all this from Yellowstone.
Yeah. You can do everything to defeat your enemy, and every method is justified. So it’s interesting to understand that mindset under today’s geopolitical environment.
Well, I’ve got a television recommendation as well, although it is even more maybe nihilistic and horrible. It’s called Gomorrah.
It’s an Italian television show. I’m now just starting the second season of it, but it’s about the crime families and criminal organizations in Naples, Italy.
We’re more familiar with the Mafia, of course, in Sicily, but this is about the Camorra crime syndicates in Naples. Very violent, really some of the most amoral characters you’ve ever encountered, but it’s shot really well.
The storytelling is very compelling, and the subtitling has been done very well, as far as I can tell. So I’m quite addicted to it, and it’s very good.
So that’s my recommendation.
And with that, I just want to thank you so much for spending so much time talking to me and having me here in your office to speak to you.
I really look forward to speaking to you again, Zhao Tong. Thank you so much. I look forward to continuing to follow your work.
You’ve been listening to the Cineca Podcast.
The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo.
Support the show through Substack at CinecaPodcast.com, where there is a growing offering of terrific original China-related writing and audio.
Email me at CinecaPod.com if you’ve got ideas on how you can help out with the show.
Don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year.
Huge thanks to my guest, Zhao Tong.
Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.
Take care.