The Daily - Why Is China Expanding Its Nuclear Arsenal?

Episode Date: July 29, 2021

For decades, nuclear weapons did not figure prominently in China’s military planning. However, recent satellite images suggest that the country may be looking to quintuple its nuclear arsenal. Why is China changing strategy now?Guest: David E. Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times.  Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Is China scrapping its “minimum deterrent” strategy and joining an arms race? Or is it merely looking to create a negotiating card?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, China appears to be undertaking the most significant expansion of its nuclear arsenal in the country's history, and it seems to want the world to know about it. And it seems to want the world to know about it. Sabrina Tavernisi spoke with our colleague David Sanger about why that is and why it matters. It's Thursday, July 29th. So, David, you're on the show again, talking about China again.

Tell me about this latest development. we got some commercial satellite photographs that showed that the Chinese were building silos all across the Western desert. Our top story at this hour, in a move to amplify its nuclear arsenal, reports reveal that China is working to build more than 100 silos. The pace of construction is startling. This is certainly significant,

if not the greatest expansion of China's nuclear arsenal. These were holes in the ground, and to the uninitiated, they may not look much. But these are nuclear silos, so they are places where you could, if you wanted, place nuclear missiles that could launch at the United States or other targets. And once you examine these images, what they showed was a field in which there were 110 or so silos going in place. And the images showed that they were very neatly spaced apart and that as they were finished, they were being covered over by these essentially big inflatable tents

that covered from satellites exactly what kind of engineering work was going on underneath. And why is it such a big deal if China's building these possible silo sites? I mean, at this point, they're just holes in the ground, right? That's absolutely right. They're holes in the ground for now. But think about the math here. You've got 110 silos at this new field, and you have 130 or 40 at another field that was discovered last month. And in each one, you can put a missile. And atop those missiles, you can put three or four nuclear warheads. So quickly, China could be preparing to quintuple its nuclear program. And that is a huge shift in strategy.

What do you mean? What has the strategy been up to this point? Well, for decades, nuclear weapons haven't really been a big focus of China's military strategy. He does bring it back in the 1960s as the nuclear arms race was heating up between the Soviet Union and the U.S. We saw stockpiling of massive numbers of nuclear arms, tens of thousands in the hands of Moscow and Washington. Chairman Mao said, let those internal and external reactionary cliques face us in trepidation.

But China made a different decision at that time, not to be a major player in that race. With indomitable and indefatigable efforts, the Chinese people will steadily attain their objectives. They decided instead to maintain just a minimum deterrent, just enough nuclear weapons to ward off attack, but not enough to actually get into the race themselves. Preparations for our nation's first nuclear test are intensely underway. Mao Zedong's thoughts guide us in all our work. So they developed their nuclear weapons in the late 50s and early 60s.

They tested them first in October 1964 to demonstrate to the world that they knew how to make them work. Five, four, three, two, one. Y'all, keep off. And Mao Zedong, who of course was the founder of modern China and the head of the Chinese Communist Party and the country's undisputed leader, didn't go ahead and build a massive stockpile the way the Americans did or the Russians did.

And the reason for that was that he wanted to focus China's energy and its money elsewhere. He wanted to spend on agriculture. He wanted to spend on building up industry into what ultimately became, long after his death, the world's second largest economy. So they never got into the arms race. That's exactly right. They built this small, minimal force. They said this should be enough to demonstrate that we could hit Moscow or New York. And they called it a day and went on to other things. That seems like a really practical approach on China's part.

I mean, that kind of hunkering down, developing its economy, and sort of flying under the radar when it comes to nuclear weapons. So, David, where did things go from there? Well, Sabrina, for a half a century after that, China largely maintained its small nuclear arsenal. It made some modest improvements here and there. It made some of the missiles harder to find. It made them more mobile. But it didn't engage in the arms race that was raging all around it. And then over time, of course, the United States and the Soviet Union finally entered into a series of treaties. The START treaty vindicates an approach to arms control that guided us for

almost a decade. That began to put some caps on their nuclear arms buildup and eventually began to destroy nuclear weapons. In a historic first for arms control, we will actually reduce U.S. and Soviet strategic nuclear arsenals. The final one of these agreements, called New START, was reached during the Obama administration. It fulfills our common objective to negotiate a new strategic arms reduction treaty. It includes significant reductions in the nuclear weapons that we will deploy.

And that limited each side to 1,550 long-range nuclear missiles. So the major players were reducing their arms, and they maintained that status quo for just about the past seven or eight years. Which brings us to those satellite images from this week. Because until now, we thought that the Chinese were just trying to improve the survivability and the quality of their nuclear weapons, but this was the first time that they may actually be interested in vastly increasing their numbers. And so the big question this raises is,

why is China changing its strategy now? We'll be right back. So, David, why has China changed its strategy? I mean, particularly given the fact that it seems like nuclear weapons have kind of faded from geopolitics. Well, that's the big mystery, Sabrina. And everyone's still trying to figure out what the motives are here. So there are a couple of different theories, and they all revolve around the fact that the world's changed a lot in the past couple of years. So the first theory is that the Chinese are actually worried about U.S. missile defenses. You know, missile defense is about knocking incoming warheads out of space or out of the sky before they land. And so we have batteries of anti-missile systems

in Alaska and California, and now some that are aboard ships out in the Pacific. And some of our missile defenses are actually starting to work, and they look pretty impressive. And the Chinese may be beginning to conclude that their old theory, which is that they could always that they can overwhelm American missile defenses by launching way more missiles at us than our missile defenses could handle. Interesting. So the U.S. missile defense system gets better, and China's smaller nuclear arsenal is suddenly not looking so strong anymore because the U.S. can effectively shoot down whatever missiles China fires. That's right.

And so it's conceivable that we kind of goaded them into this, that in building missile defense to protect us against North Korea or Iran, we've actually provoked the Chinese into building up their arsenal. Right. So that's theory number one. What's the next one? Well, the next one is that the Chinese are also worried about some of their neighbors

and their nuclear improvements. So Russia has put a huge amount of money into modernizing its force. It now has or is building hypersonic nuclear weapons. They've got autonomous nuclear torpedoes that they're building. Vladimir Putin is always boasting about these. And so they've always got to keep an eye on Russia. But they're also worried about India,

with whom the Chinese have all kinds of border disputes underway now. And India has built up its nuclear force. It's now getting pretty big. It's getting close to the size of the Chinese force. Now, most of India's nuclear weapons are built to counter Pakistan, India's great adversary here. But the Chinese are worried about these as well. All of this suggests that there may be a regional component to this in addition to countering the U.S. So that's the second theory. Got it.

And then there's a third theory that this really isn't about a military buildup. It's mostly about diplomatic brinksmanship with the United States. What do you mean, David? Well, Sabrina, back in the last year of the Trump administration, the New START treaty with Russia was coming up for a five-year renewal. And it seemed like a pretty simple thing to do. But President Trump said that isn't enough. He said, I want a nuclear treaty that covers all the major nuclear powers, starting with China. He said, I want them in this as well.

Well, that seemed highly impractical, in part because they weren't a party to the first treaty. So you'd have to negotiate something entirely anew, get it through the U.S. Senate, get it through the Russian process, get it through the Chinese process. And second, the Chinese came along and said, forget about it. Who are you guys? You're sitting here with 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons, thousands more in storage, and you're complaining about our measly 300 or so? You know, when you guys are ready to cut down to 300 weapons, then maybe we'll talk. But until then, shut up and go away. And so what happens? Well, what happened was there was a complete stalemate during the Trump period. And President Biden was sworn in on January 20th, and he had 15 days to renew this treaty before it expired. So the Biden administration

said, let's extend New START and begin to think about ways of engaging the Chinese on arms control in the future. And the Chinese may be thinking that if, in fact, they get wrapped into nuclear negotiations in the future, they don't want to come to the table with a mere 300 weapons. Right. As my friend Graham Allison at Harvard, who wrote the definitive history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, said, if you're going to play poker and you sit down at the table and somebody said, poker and you sit down at the table and somebody said, I'm going to give you a fifth as many poker chips as the guy sitting opposite you, you're going to pick up and walk away.

Right. So they may well be creating some poker chips for themselves. They may be drilling these holes in the desert to say, you guys want to get into a nuclear negotiation? Let's start with parity and then we can talk. Right. So this theory is essentially saying the Chinese are looking at the American stockpile, realizing that they're eventually going to need to be doing some negotiating and saying,

oh my gosh, we need to be building some poker chips. That's right. But there's also a chance this is all a giant shell game. What do you mean shell game? Well, they don't have to put a missile in every one of those 240 holes in the ground. If they just put 20 missiles in and are pretty stealthy about it, the United States may not know which one of those silos actually has a live nuclear missile and which one is sitting empty. Interesting. So given all of these possible motivations for China to build up its nuclear capacity here, which one of these theories

is the leading contender right now in your mind, David? I mean, which theory do security experts think is most likely? Well, as has been true throughout nuclear history, the experts are all divided here. But I'd say the preponderance of the views I've heard fall into two camps. The first is the Chinese want options. And by building these fields, they've created the option to vastly accelerate their force or to enter negotiations as an equal player. But the second thing to remember here, Sabrina, is that the Chinese government now views itself as a full-spectrum superpower. It's already got the world's second-lar largest economy on the way to becoming the largest. It's got influence throughout the world, in part because of the spread of its telecommunications network reach

around the world. And the last element to fall into place is to have truly global reach with their military. And nuclear weapons are a piece of that. They're only a piece. You need space weapons, which they're working on. You need a blue water navy that can range around the world, which they're working on. But if you don't have a full nuclear arsenal in their mind, you may not be regarded as a full superpower. And in the end, that may be what this is all about.

Hearing you say this, what is going through my mind is that nuclear weapons and the nuclear age that we kind of thought was behind us, you know, this relic of the Cold War, are really still with us, that we are still in a nuclear age? I don't think it was ever behind us. It just fell off of the front page headlines. You know, we went through 20 years of more traditional conflicts and counterterrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. We focused on Chinese technological developments, its cyber capability, its space capability. But what we're seeing now is just a new phase in the nuclear standoff. The Chinese recognize that nuclear weapons are still their ultimate guarantors of security.

And we're not sure what happens now. Now that the Russians are pouring a lot of time and money into new types of nuclear weapons, that the United States has tried to match that, and that China is moving ahead with what appears to be a significant expansion, even if there is a big shell game underway here. And so this may be one of those turning points in history where we have to think anew about nuclear arms control and what it would take to ultimately eliminate these weapons.

Because if one thing's clear in the past few weeks, they aren't going away. Thank you, David. Thank you. Here's what else you need to know today. At a time when Washington seems broken, this group of members behind me came together, along with others, and decided we were going to do something great for our country. On Wednesday, Democratic and Republican senators took a series of major steps toward adopting President Biden's $1 trillion plan for infrastructure. During a news conference, a bipartisan group of senators said they had reached a deal on a bill that would upgrade roads, bridges, pipes, and transit systems.

Soon after, the Senate advanced the bill in a procedural vote. On this vote, the yeas are 67, the nays are 32. The motion upon reconsideration is agreed to. But the infrastructure package still faces an uncertain path to becoming law. It must pass an evenly divided Senate and maneuver around a potential Republican filibuster, which would require the support of at least 10 Senate Republicans. And the move toward vaccine mandates by the government intensified on Wednesday. The Times reports that President Biden has decided to require that all federal workers take the vaccine or be regularly tested for COVID-19. And Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the same requirement for all government workers in New York.

Today's episode was produced by Rochelle Banja, Rob Zipko, and Michael Simon-Johnson. It was edited by Michael Benoit and M.J. Davis-Lynn, engineered by Chris Wood, and contains original music by Dan Powell. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael O'Barr. See you tomorrow.