A formation of mobile DF-31AG nuclear missiles participates in a military parade in Beijing. During a test on Sept. 25, 2024, a DF-31AG fitted with a dummy warhead was launched from Hainan Island and landed in the Pacific Ocean about 7,000 miles east near French Polynesia. The launch, the first since 1980, was viewed as a signal directed at the U.S. and its Pacific allies as regional tensions with China increase. Pan Yulong/China Ministry of Defense
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S&P: Is China Prepared to Uncork the Nuclear Option?

Nov. 1, 2024

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hina could be more ready to launch a nuclear first-strike than the U.S. realizes, raising the specter of a “limited nuclear exchange” in the Pacific, experts warn, and increasing the risks should conflict breakout and escalate in the future. 

The U.S. faces the “increased likelihood of a limited nuclear exchange in a future Indo-Pacific crisis scenario,” notes a new report from the Atlantic Council. Based on a wargame plus analysis of China’s public statements and internal machinations, the September report asserts that China would drop its “no-first-use” policy should an attempted invasion of Taiwan begin to fail. 

U.S. “institutional assumptions” about how and when China might resort to nuclear weapons are “flawed,” the authors said. The U.S. National Security and National Defense strategies need to consider China’s burgeoning nuclear inventory and the chance that it could follow an unconventional nuclear strategy, unleashing theater nuclear weapons against U.S. forces in Guam should an attempted invasion begin to falter. 

John Culver, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub and a longtime CIA analyst specializing in East Asian Affairs, said assumptions that nuclear powers will hold their fire rather than use nuclear weapons are unproven. 

China is “prepared to ‘go there,’” he said during a webinar releasing the study. 

Culver, David O. Shullman, Kitsch Liao and Samantha Wong co-wrote the Atlantic report, titled “Adapting U.S. Strategy to Account for China’s Transformation into a Peer Nuclear Power.”

The report is based on a wargame set in 2032, in which China invades Taiwan but secures only a tenuous lodgment. When follow-on forces are destroyed by the U.S. and tougher-than-expected resistance by Taiwanese forces, China finds itself with “no credible off-ramp to claim victory.” Faced with that challenge, Chinese President Xi Jinping must weigh the consequences of going nuclear or accepting defeat. 

“The need to prevent such failure would likely justify the use of any and all measures, including nuclear employment, once the invasion is underway,” the authors concluded.

In the wargame, the “Blue” U.S. force was surprised when the “Red” force “attacked Guam with two very large devices,” Culver said. One struck the air base and the other attacked the naval base there, effectively taking Guam “off the board” as a launch pad for long-range strikes against China and as a logistical hub for sustaining allied forces in the Western Pacific.  

The Red team had previously signaled the potential use of nuclear weapons, he said, firing long-range conventional weapons from ballistic missile submarines at U.S. forces and West Coast bases; at least one overflew Guam. The missiles were intercepted, but the clear message was that these could just as well be nuclear weapons. The Red force also engaged in counterspace and cyberattacks, while the Blue force pressed the conventional fight.

Meanwhile, a “Green” team—representing regional allies—took significant hits and insisted that “nuclear security guarantees to them required that the U.S. respond proportionally.” To preserve the credibility of its nuclear deterrence guarantees, the Blue force did so.

According to Culver, Xi believes the world is in the midst of a “tectonic shift,” a reset akin to what followed the end of World War I, when major empires collapsed and a New World Order took shape. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other events have demonstrated to Xi, he said, that “major power war and even nuclear war are back on the table, after being off the table since the end of the Cold War.” 

In recent years, Xi elevated missile and nuclear forces to a full military service, seeing those as of increasing importance, Culver said. “It no longer suited China’s interest to have a minimal deterrence capability now that a new, more dangerous world was emerging and the potential for war was rising, especially great power war,” he said.  

Having submitted to what it considers “nuclear blackmail … at least three times in the past,” Culver said, China has decided it will not do so again. 

The U.S. government, meanwhile, has not awakened to the challenge posed by China’s evolving strategy. U.S. strategists view China’s nuclear program as building strategic forces to “sustain a minimal retaliatory posture,” the report states, while “China now has a higher likelihood of using its newfound nuclear power to more actively deter or compel its opponents and safeguard its core interests.” 

Beijing is willing to use its power, however, to counter “perceived external threats that could negatively impact domestic political interests.”

Meanwhile, the authors write, “structural issues within the U.S. government decision-making process” work against nuclear escalation. These include “fragmentation” and decision-making silos that could lead, in the face of crisis, to “disjointed and … flawed recommendations.” 

The authors argue that “The misreading of China’s core interests contained in these disjointed COAs [courses of action] leads to tension between the United States winning a conventional war and maintaining nuclear deterrence, and also creating uncertain trade-offs in scarce military resources.” 

In the end, American failure “to recognize that as China rapidly expands its nuclear arsenal and delivery capabilities, it will behave in a way consistent with the status of a nuclear peer power,” poses the gravest risk: This “could translate into a false U.S. assumption that China would not contemplate” a first use of nuclear weapons, which could, in turn, lock the United States and China into an inadvertent escalation spiral that could ultimately trigger a nuclear war. 

Allies and Signals

In a hot war with China, Japan and South Korea are likely to pressure the U.S. “to ramp up nuclear signaling” and “escalate in the nuclear realm,” the authors said—especially if those countries have already lost forces in the conflict and feel vulnerable to continuing attack. 

Also complicating the strategy is China’s relationship with Russia, which the authors said could “shape China’s decision-making calculus on nuclear first use.” Russia could seek to “exploit any crisis” in the Indo-Pacific for its own purposes elsewhere, they added, “exercising nuclear coercion to achieve its own ends.” 

U.S. nuclear theory is “informed by historical memory from the Cold War,” the authors write, but dealing with China as a nuclear power requires a different playbook. 

“While Russia’s signaling has been aggressive, escalatory, and clearly communicated, China’s signaling methods tend to be more subtle and ambiguous,” they write. “China has intentionally created these ambiguous redlines, partially to exploit what they perceived as the risk-averse nature of the U.S. and allied decision-making process.”

Beijing is tight-lipped about its nuclear forces, which the U.S. estimates will include more than 1,000 deliverable warheads by the end of the decade. Yet as China’s nuclear inventory is still well below U.S. or Russian stockpiles, Beijing has ignored all invitations to participate in strategic arms talks.

“China’s lack of nuclear transparency may … be attributable to its historically inferior nuclear force,” the report says. As China builds toward nuclear parity with the U.S. and Russia, however, it may yet “be persuaded to become more transparent about its nuclear capabilities and intentions.” 

The authors argue that for Beijing to “safely wield its newfound nuclear peer status to achieve national goals, it must increase transparency of its nuclear intentions and capability both before and during a crisis. More clarity is needed to close this gap between China’s stated nuclear doctrine and its actual motivations, behavior, and intent.”

Bonny Lin, director of the China Power Project and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said on the webinar that the wargame underplayed the amount of coordination that would likely take place between China and Russia. 

“China is not going to ask Russia for permission,” she said. “China is not going to be telling Russia every single move. [But] I would expect support from Russia early on, even maybe before the invasion has started.” 

Lin said the exercise demonstrated a serious “lack of crisis communications” between China and the U.S., a concern U.S. leaders have raised with Beijing. 

Eric Chan, senior nonresident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute, who participated in the wargame, said he did not think a nuclear strike by China would “get either the U.S. or Taiwan to back off.” Rather, he said, it would prompt them to accelerate the conventional campaign, and “really change the game” for Taiwan “in terms of how they resist the PRC.”

The wargame suggests that Taiwan is right to stockpile weapons and enhance its readiness to fight a protracted war.

“Ukraine’s readiness and resilience against [Vladimir] Putin’s nuclear threats is one of the two reasons why Putin hasn’t employed nuclear weapons against Ukraine,” he said. 

President Joe Biden “has quietly threatened Putin that if they were to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, then the U.S. would use conventional airpower to wipe out these forces in Ukraine.” Also important is that “Ukraine hasn’t shown any signs of being wobbly against Putin’s nuclear use, and that decreases the threat from the nuclear use.”

Culver noted in the webinar that most of the arms control treaties between the U.S. and Russia have been “swept away” in recent years except for the SALT II agreement, which comes up for renewal next year. 

Russia has indicated it may not renew. Under SALT, Russia and the U.S. kept their deliverable warheads to 1,550, many of them “outmoded … air-drop bombs,” according to Culver. 

China’s rapid expansion of nuclear ICBM capacity changes the entire equation, and makes nuclear war now seem more possible than it has in decades. 

“The whole panoply of things that allowed us to no longer ‘think about the unthinkable,’ … is wearing thin,” Culver said. China “owes an explanation” to its neighbors and opponents “about what it’s doing.”