The US-China 'Strategic' Nuclear-Competition Narrative

As soon as POTUS Donald Trump identified China as the source of the USA's most serious 'national' [more accurately, primacy-rooted global] security challenges in his December 2017 National Security Strategy report [NSS_BookLayout_FIN_121917.indd (archives.gov)], USG launched an 'all-of-Government' endeavour to counteract the 'China threat', a theoretical formulation which then became the formal organising principle behind most 'national security' activities. DoD's nuclear planning- and targeting efforts logically followed this modification. In 1998, Presidents Clinton and Jiang Zemin, meeting in the aftermath of Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests proclaiming their NWS status, agreed to 'de-target' respective ICBMs so that they were not automatically set to hit strike-points in each other's territory. Although this was a technical formality adding perhaps a few hours, possibly just minutes - to re-targeting processes in any future crises - the political symbolism was significant. And that may well have been the idea.

Things changed quite quickly, of course: the USAF's bombing of the US embassy in Belgrade on 7th May 1999, the Office of Net Assessment's annual 'summer study' report of 4th August 1999 identifying China as an emerging 'constant competitor' [and India as a potential swing-state], and Congress ordering the Executive Branch via NDAA2000 just a few weeks later - specifically, DoD, the NDU, and the Intel Community - to initiate rigorous counter-PRC/PLA activities, and submit time-bound reports thereon, - transformed the perceptual focus on China on the US security establishment's cognitive landscape.

The strategic-commentariat, operating in the establishment's penumbra, conjectured, explicated, analysed and endorsed the core 'China-threat' formulation in support of the perpetual primacy determination of the Bush Administration's post-Cold War grand-strategic vision. This foundational vision was formalised via DPG FY1994-1999 in April 1992 [Defense Planning: Guidance FY 1994-1999 April 16, 1992 (archives.gov)].

Once the US-proclaimed and -waged Global War on Terrorism waned, countering China's perceived threats to US perpetual-primacy emerged as the fundamental axiom around which US systemic-determinations and policy-praxis evolved. Strategic nuclear doctrine, planning and discourse evolved appropriately. President Biden's March 2024 Nuclear Employment Guidance refocused primary attention from Russia to China - two years after Russia mounted its invasion of Ukraine, with intermittent issuance of nuclear-use threats- [Biden Approved Secret Nuclear Weapons Strategy Focusing on China - The New York Times (nytimes.com)]. This was thus the culmination of a long process. Biden's nuclear-employment guidance, the latest directive in a growing series of 'national security'-directives, left no doubts as to where the most visceral of US insecurities lay.

Presenting USG's National Defence Strategy, SoD Lloyd Austin wrote: "The PRC remains our most consequential strategic competitor." He'd reached this conclusion "based on the PRC's increasingly coercive actions to reshape the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to fit its authoritarian preferences, alongside a keen awareness of the PRC's clearly stated intentions and the rapid modernization and expansion of its military." [2022 National Defense Strategy, Nuclear Posture Review, and Missile Defense Review ]

Although China had no major military bases on non-Chinese territory in the region, and DoD commanded many facilities close to China's shores, PLA behaviour was seen as 'coercive' and 'aggressive'. Quoting Biden's NSS, Austin reiterated, "the PRC is 'the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order, and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and the technological power to do so'." So, US 'displacement anxiety' - its fear that China not only sought to erode US systemic primacy, but was also determined to supplant it at the peak of the global power-hierarchy - precipitated perceptions of existential threats not so much to the USA, but to the avowed and formalised determination indefinitely to sustain, mainly militarily - its 'sole-superpower' status. This challenge could simply not be countenanced. Hence the strategic-nuclear discourse.

Austin told compatriots - and the wider world, 'Strategic deterrence remains a top priority mission for the DoD and the Nation. For the foreseeable future nuclear weapons will continue to provide unique deterrence effects that no other element of US military power can replace. To deter aggression and preserve our security in the current security environment, we will maintain nuclear forces that are responsive to the threats we face.' [Nuclear Posture Review, ibid., 2022, p.1] Austin acknowledged, leaders of P5 NWS [France, PRC, Russian Federation, UK, USA] had jointly 'affirmed that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, and that nuclear weapons should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war.' That unprecedented consensus did not prevent the continuation of Russia's 'special technical operation' against Ukraine, a UN-member state, nor Russia's repeated articulation of threats to employ nuclear weapons under certain vaguely-defined circumstances.

Austin's remarks were reinforced by General Cotton, Commander of the US Strategic Command: 'We are confronting not one, but two nuclear peers, the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China....The PRC is surpassing the United States and its number of fixed ICBM launchers. And projections indicate its nuclear arsenal would encompass approximately 1,000 warheads by 2030.' [SASC Fiscal Year 2025 U.S. Strategic Command and U.S. Space Command Posture Hearing > U.S. Strategic Command > Speeches & Transcripts (stratcom.mil)]

Where size does not matter

Although US and allied aggregate nuclear arsenals, as well as Russia's - deployed and ready-for-deployment - far exceeded China's, China still outstripped Russia as the source of perceived threat. China's nuclear arsenal relative to those of the USA and Russia, was puny [SIPRI 2022: Russia-4,489 warheads; US-3,708 warheads; America's updated nuclear arsenal compared to China, Russia - Newsweek Popular Science and the BBC offered different figures: Russia-5,977 warheads; US-5,428 warheads; China-350 warheads. The Russian and American nuclear arsenals, explained | Popular Science (popsci.com) ; China has sharply expanded nuclear arsenal, US says (bbc.com)]

In 2023, DoD assessed that Beijing 'hoped to double its arsenal to over 1,000 warheads by 2030.' China's relatively tiny arsenal notwithstanding, in 2022, Austin emphasised, 'the PRC is the overall pacing challenge for US defense planning and a growing factor in evaluating our nuclear deterrent.' His mathematically unclear explanation: 'The PRC has embarked on an ambitious expansion, modernization, and diversification of its nuclear forces and established a nascent nuclear triad. The PRC likely intends to possess at least 1,000 deliverable warheads by the end of the decade.' [2022 National Defense Strategy, Nuclear Posture Review, and Missile Defense Review ]

His concern: 'the trajectory of these [Chinese] efforts points to a large, diverse nuclear arsenal with a high degree of survivability, reliability, and effectiveness. This could provide the PRC with new options before and during a crisis or conflict to leverage nuclear weapons for coercive purposes, including military provocations against US Allies and partners in the region.' Apparently, an unstated presumption was that such conduct may have been acceptable on the part of the USA and Russia, but China's replication of this pattern could not be countenanced.

For USG, the key concern seemed to be, 'by the 2030s the US will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries. This will create new stresses on stability and new challenges for deterrence, assurance, arms control, and risk reduction.' The import of strategic stability could not be over-emphasised, as President Biden himself noted separately.

The offence-defence-deterrence-compellence debate

The US view of Beijing's perceptions is illuminating: 'The PRC characterizes its view of strategic competition in terms of a rivalry among powerful nation states, as well as a clash of opposing ideological systems. PRC leaders believe that structural changes in the international system and a confrontational United States are the root causes of intensifying strategic competition between the PRC and the United States. ? In March 2023, Xi Jinping told delegates to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference that “Western countries led by the United States have implemented comprehensive containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development.” [2023 Report on the Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China (CMPR) (defense.gov) ]

In DoD assessments, 'the PRC’s strategy entails deliberate and determined efforts to amass, improve, and harness the internal and external elements of national power that will place the PRC in a “leading position” in an enduring competition between systems.' Although USG under POTUS Trump had formally proclaimed 'great-power competition' with China, China was apparently mistaken to perceive 'an enduring competition between systems.'

Against the backdrop of this asymmetric mutual-perceptual dynamic, defined and dialectically informed by mutual-insecurity, 'China has sought to build and maintain a credible nuclear second-strike capability (that is, to be able to launch a devastating nuclear retaliation after absorbing a disarming first strike). It has done so to secure a relationship of mutual vulnerability with the United States.' [Political Drivers of China’s Changing Nuclear Policy: Implications for U.S.-China Nuclear Relations and International Security - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ]

China's 'traditional' view of nuclear-deterrence could, under some circumstances, offer the basis of dialogue-based mutual-assured deterrence on the pattern of the Cold War-era US-USSR MAD framework. But MAD appeared to work because both USG and Moscow found it to be a mutually acceptable paradigm. Today, Washington questions Beijing's right to expand its relatively puny arsenal to a proportion China considers essential to assuring 2nd-strike retaliatory-capability-based deterrence. This asymmetric perceptual barrier to 'strategic stability' is allegedly reinforced by another asymmetry: 'To Chinese political leaders, a stable U.S.-China relationship means, first and foremost, a U.S. willingness to accept the legitimacy of China’s political system, coexist peacefully with China, and respect China’s so-called core interests.' [Ibid.] And that, seems to be a questionable expectation.

Since around 2012-2013, Beijing's spokesmen have offered a formulation for securing and assuring Sino-US strategic stability. This would entail political accord at the structural level based on 'the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence' first presented by Premier Zhou Enlai on 31st December 1953; these subsequently were adopted by China, India and Myanmar, and integrated into the Bandung Conference Declaration in 1955 [ir.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/dtxw/201407/t20140702_1894012.htm ]

The five principles gave rise to a more succinct formulation, presented by then State Councilor Yang Jiechi as the bases for 'a new type of international relations: Mutual respect and equality [including inviolability of the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of all States]; mutual benefit and common development [upholding an open world economy, oppose protectionism, strive for globalization that is a more balanced, inclusive, and beneficial for all]; mutually beneficial cooperation; and strategic mutual trust.' [b6770fc27d0715b3f0a1456cde003d92282dbe72.pdf (cirsd.org)] Chinese officials have since then, summarised these 'principles' into 'equality, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation.' This formulation has found some resonance in 'the global South', but US silence has been deafening.

The Thermo-Nuclear Dialogue of the Deaf

The question, who is trying to coerce/deter whom appears to be moot because the Sino-US 'competition' - as seen from the D.C. Beltway and Zhongnanhai respectively - is perceptually mutually exclusive. USG, determined to perpetuate its post-Soviet unipolar primacy, considers any challenge to its 'sole superpower' status a threat. In 1999, a key organ of its 'national' security establishment identified China as an emergent 'constant competitor.' By 2007, China's 'A2/AD' defensive carapace was assessed to be a threat to the primate's planetary force-projection fiat - and hence a challenge.

Beijing's steady acquisition of 'comprehensive national power' and a willingness to assert its claims and views about systemic imbalances and 'injustice' turned it into the 'principal' potential near-peer rival' that DoD was tasked to 'deter, and if deterrence failed, defeat,' in combat. Although Russia acted against Georgia in 2008, and Ukraine, in 2014 and 2022, USG was focused on its 'China-threat' formulation. Its primary response has been in the military domain, although President Obama initiated a limited 'tariff-and-restrictions' programme which Presidents Trump and Biden rapidly and significantly escalated.

In the military realm, formation of the Quad, AUKUS, 'Squad', the US-Japan-RoK triad and several other 'minilateral/plurilateral' groupings was topped by NATO being urged to add a Pacific AoR to its Atlanticist Charter-based operational perspective. The political objective of indefinitely extending coalition-aided unipolar primacy, challenged by China's determined rejection of systemic subordination, created a strategic landscape on which inflammable interaction at incendiary flashpoints generate prospects for confrontation spiraling to conflict and, escalation across the conventional-nuclear threshold. [introduction---deterrence-diplomacy-and-the-risk-of-conflict-over-taiwan.pdf (iiss.org); executive-summary---deterrence-diplomacy-and-the-risk-of-conflict-over-taiwan.pdf (iiss.org) ]

The circumstances under which the US-led coalition could embark on combat with China have openly been analysed at DoD-behest at least since 2015 [ War with China: A View from Early 2024 > US Army War College - Strategic Studies Institute > Display; U.S. Military Theories of Victory for a War with the People's Republic of China | RAND; U.S. Strategic Competition with China: A RAND Research Primer (dtic.mil); United States and China: Trends in Military Competition | RAND]

The scale and intensity of a US-China conflict, given the destructive power at the disposal of the two states, the depth of adversarial passion, the profound investment in 'face'/'honour', and the prospects of system-altering outcomes at home and beyond, make for a lethal combination of restraint-disincentives and explosive-escalatory-incentives.

Against that backdrop, the probability of profound insecurity at the first major loss of lives/assets triggering a jump across the conventional-nuclear threshold cannot be discounted. Assuming the victim of a first-strike having residual second-strike capability, the planet's first nuclear-exchange is almost a certainty. Even if such an exchange remains 'relatively small', should the retaliatory-strike capability be 'modest', substantial 'value'-destruction on both shores of the Pacific will bring about widespread death-and-disruption to the world's top economies.

Should the US-led coalition join in, perhaps followed by at least a theoretically possible Russian response - a probability that cannot be discounted - the world's productive, scientific-technological, and organisational centres would be decimated and laid bare for decades. Even if these exchanges were not large enough to trigger a 'global winter', the outcomes in terms challenges facing organising lives for the surviving societies, and for planetary 'normalisation', are unpredictable but definitely malign to an unprecedented degree. Humanity could likely recover from such a catastrophe, but given the number of unknowable variables, and their even more unknowable interactions, the precise nature of the recovery remains beyond calculability.

Perhaps with this challenge in mind, DoD commissioned RAND to study how best USG could engage China in a war, restricting combat within the conventional realm, ending warfighting without escalation into the nuclear domain, and retain - indeed reinforce - primacy once the missiles and their warheads had fallen silent. The quandary RAND analysts presented to DoD was, 'Any costs [in a conventional war] the US imposes would have to be high enough that Chinese leaders give up their war aims. But they can't be so high that those leaders risk catastrophic escalation instead.' [How to Manage Escalation with Nuclear Adversaries Like China | RAND; U.S. Military Theories of Victory for a War with the People's Republic of China | RAND]

This 'Goldilocks challenge' has cast a shadow over US war-planning against China. Experience - 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, 1969 Sino-Soviet border-conflict-triggered crisis, 1995-96 US-China Taiwan crisis - showed in real-life confrontations, leaders never secured sufficient and timely intelligence enabling them to grasp the essence of the 'enemy' objectives and, perhaps more significantly, their 'red lines', to make rational and effective operational decisions, in any of these three instances. That suggests limits to human cognitive capabilities, compounded by the fog of war caused by imperfect, incomplete, unsteady and untimely information, will more likely than not generate decisions that are inefficient in effecting meaningful deterrence, or defeat, or preventing thermonuclear-escalation, and securing planetary wellbeing. And that before a binary, bilateral exchange is convoluted by the possible entry of Russia, France and the UK into the fray.

A caveat not usually discussed in the US-China war-discourse: the role of subjectivity in an activity, i.e., statecraft including inter-state warfare, often defined, described and explained along 'rational' lines by doyens of both 'realist' and 'neo-conservative' schools. Assuming all state-actors are led by perfectly rational leaders even as they confront feared/suspected/anticipated existential threats - where exactly along the poorly-understood combat-dialectics-trajectory, built upon knowledge of the two rivals' absorption of losses, would their imperfectly analysed cost-benefit calculations trigger a decapitating nuclear first-strike? Certainly on the 'Allied' side, there is little consensus on this point. The CMC/PLA has been more reticent, simply reiterating its 'no first-use' pledge. The degree of uncertainty seems daunting.

DoD did come up with a partial - or hedging - solution. This was to destroy - in understandable terms - China's nuclear strike-forces with non-nuclear weapons-systems so that Beijing was left bereft of any capacity for a nuclear second-strike. This, the assumption appears to have been, would prevent the PLARF from mounting a nuclear-strike on USG strike-points, forcing the residual Chinese authorities to concede defeat and sue for peace. The designated conventional strike-forces included aircraft carrying 'bombs and short-range missiles, and cruise and ballistic missiles.' Relevant cruise missiles 'include the JASSM-ER and -XR, Tomahawk, AMRAAM, SM-3 and SM-6, fired from stealth bombers and other aircraft, vessels, and land bases.' The Zumwalt-class destroyer/cruiser, currently being 'retrofitted with hypersonic missiles', would add to the conventional-on-nuclear strike force. [Report-Masters-of-the-Air-.pdf (scrapweapons.com) ]

The combination of US missile-defence systems deployed near China, and its conventional (usually dual-capable) strike-systems with ranges covering the bulk of Chinese ballistic-missile brigade-stations, is believed to offer USG with the capability to strike and render non-operational virtually all of China's land-based IRBM/ICBM arsenal. China-proximate coalition detection-systems are believed capable of detecting and locating PLAN Jin-class SSBNs carrying JL-3 SLBMs. Conventional ISR and strike-assets based in Guam, Japan [particularly Okinawa], the RoK, and possibly in the EDCA-bases in the Philippines, Taiwan, and Australia, are assessed to have the ability to block all PLAN movements across the choke-points represented by key passages/termini of the Soya/La Perouse, Tsuruga, Tsukishima, Osumi, Miyako, Taiwan, Malacca, Luzon, and Singapore Straits, and the Bashi Channel. The effect would be to box in PLA offensive assets within the 1st Island Chain battle-space, and destroy these in a swift, multi-domain, conventional '1st strike', thereby not triggering a nuclear response.

The crux of this presumed planning-concept resides in a complex, finely- coordinated joint strike with conventional systems aiming at the assured destruction of all Chinese ISR systems, and ALL offensive capabilities, giving Beijing no time or opportunity to retaliate. Until quite recently, the PLA's technological lag suggested DoD could assume success in such an endeavour [Opinion | US-China race for surveillance supremacy in South China Sea risks a needless clash | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)] Several individually relatively minor caveats need, however, to be articulated now, in the second half of 2024.

A rationalist Q&A series

• DoD organs began identifying in 2022-23 Chinese ability to deploy cyber- offensive tools to degrade not only DoD assets in Guam [and presumably, other regional facilities], but also reduce both military and commercial infrastructure in CONUS: China's cyber-actors are 'not focused just on political and military targets. We can see from where they position themselves across civilian infrastructure that low blows are just a possibility in the event of a conflict; low blows against civilians are part of China's plan...The PRC's cyber onslaught goes way beyond prepositioning for future conflict. Today, and literally every day, they're actively attacking our economic security, engaging in wholesale theft of our innovation, and our personal and corporate data." [Wray: Chinese hackers aim to 'wreak havoc' on U.S. critical infrastructure : NPR]
• China's 'rapidly modernizing military is building capabilities far in excess of China’s defense needs while supporting Beijing’s coercive diplomacy. Competition with the PRC takes place on a global scale, and although that contest remains below the threshold of armed conflict, it is nonetheless strategic in its effects and its implications. PRC-sponsored cyber actors represent a sophisticated and growing threat to the United States’ and allies’ interests.' [2023 POSTURE STATEMENT OF GENERAL PAUL M. NAKASONE > U.S. Cyber Command > News ]
• If these assessments were accurate, and not part of a well-designed anti-China information campaign, then, the temporal window for eliminating Chinese retaliatory-assets with conventional [global] strikes before triggering a Chinese cyber-response would likely be quite narrow.
• The tighter the temporal window, the greater the complexity of mounting a flawless, undetectable, joint- and multi-domain conventional strike from geospatially dispersed origin-points ranging from THAAD-bases in South Korea through facilities in Japan, Okinawa, Guam and Luzon, to long-range bomber bases in northern Australia, and possibly farther afield. This complexity - not impossible to overcome but challenging nonetheless - opens up the possibility some of the movements being detected - unless Chinese satellite systems were destroyed suddenly and completely without raising any alarm in Beijing.
• When such indicators arrive at the desks of a leadership already conscious of the steady ratcheting up of pressure, openly threatening leadership remarks, statements, policy-documentation and legislation, accumulating military-security literature, and intensifying conventional deployments in proximate battle-spaces, would it be unreasonable for such leaders to assume the worst, and reach for 'use-it-or-lose-it' options?
• If DoD's counter-sat/ISR operations were totally successful, engulfing China in a comprehensive information blackout - given current US sci-technical capabilities, this is theoretically not entirely impossible - would a target political/military leadership assume this was just a harmless glitch to be calmly ridden over, or would it more likely assume the worst and respond as though it faced existential threats?
• Could DoD systems utterly destroy ALL Chinese ISR/detection assets, as well as ALL land-based and sea-launched offensive systems, with a very short - perhaps minutes-long - singular strike with NO opportunity for any PLA response against even regional US and/or allied assets and values? What cost-benefit assumptions would underpin such an inference? What if the factors going into calculations were even slightly imperfect? These rather absolutist questions, and the answers to these - assume vital import, given the planetary price of strategic- indeed grand-strategic- miscalculations.