Today, Explained - A third nuclear superpower

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

For decades, a delicate strategy of deterrence kept Russia and the US from nuclear war. With China upping its nuclear ambitions, things are about to get a lot more complicated.  This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Michael Raphael, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another. J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of Peter, Tony, and the atomic bomb, had become death. But before that, he was trained as a theoretical physicist, and he would have been familiar with something called the three-body problem. It's the question of how three masses attracted by gravity move in relation to each other. Injecting a third entity into any two-party

situation changes the dynamic, like third wheel on a date. There used to be two nuclear-armed superpowers, the U.S. and the USSR, later Russia. Now, China has entered the chat, and a decades-long strategy of disarm and deter is being reworked to accommodate a third party. Ahead on Today Explained. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs? And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino.

Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Matt Korda is a Senior Research Fellow for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, or in Matt's words, he counts nukes. And lately, Matt's words, he counts nukes. And lately, he's been counting China's nukes. So for decades, China maintained this relatively small nuclear arsenal of only a couple hundred warheads.

And we can contrast that to the U.S. and Russia's arsenal of several thousand. But China having just a few hundred nuclear warheads seemed to satisfy them because in their estimation, 200 warheads will deter an adversary just as effectively as 2,000. And so spending fewer resources on its nuclear arsenal allowed China to focus on things like growing its economy, growing its conventional military posture. But today, it's becoming clear that China is no longer satisfied with just a small number of warheads. And we're seeing that China is pretty significantly growing its nuclear arsenal.

And so the Pentagon, in its most recent report to Congress, projected that China could potentially have as many as 700 warheads by 2027 and as many as 1,000 by 2030. And it's still, you know, a little unclear as to whether or not those estimates are going to come true, but the growth itself can't really be questioned anymore. Is China public about this? Is China letting us know, letting the world know what it's doing? Absolutely not. So, you know, just like many nuclear-armed countries, China does not like to talk publicly about its nuclear arsenal.

And so what we have to do in order to get information about these countries is that we use what are called open sources, right? These are sources that involve things like unofficial testimonies. We look at programmatic documents, budgetary documents. We watch military parade videos. And most importantly, we look at programmatic documents, budgetary documents, we watch military parade videos, and most importantly, we use commercial satellite imagery. You know, in July 2021, I was one of several researchers across a variety of teams who discovered and disclosed the existence of these large missile silo fields. New satellite images showing that China is apparently building up its nuclear capabilities.

Researchers say that it's possible more than 100 missile silos are being built in a new base in China's western deserts. This is the second missile base found this month alone. And so, you know, we're really able to see how these fields are expanding in basically in real time because you can watch the construction happen from space, which is pretty incredible. Do we know why China is expanding its capability? I guess I would say that the decision to increase the number of nuclear weapons in the Chinese arsenal is probably not caused by a single issue, but probably by a combination of factors. So one of these could be that China is trying to posture itself against the United States' improving military arsenal. We must modernize and rebuild

our nuclear arsenal, hopefully never having to use it, but making it so strong and so powerful that it will deter any acts of aggression. And they're looking at their own posture and saying, you know what, this isn't sufficient enough anymore to be able to deal with these threats. And another important one that I think is useful to think about is that there could be a potential prestige factor here, right? Big nuclear powers like the U.S. and Russia have really big nuclear arsenals, and they have, you know, hundreds of silos. And so perhaps China wants to demonstrate that it is a serious nuclear player here. And I don't think it's necessarily a coincidence that the number of missile silos that China is building pretty much is roughly equivalent to what the U.S. has and what Russia has as well. From, I guess it would have been the early 80s,

there's been a push toward nuclear disarmament. In the United States, you know, I'm thinking of the Berrigan brothers, I'm thinking of Martin Sheen. There has been hope over the decades that the world would move toward a less nuclear-armed situation. What has happened to the idea of nonproliferation? Yeah, so, you know, what we're seeing now is that these trends that were taking place after the Cold War, these very encouraging trends in which we saw significant deep cuts

to global nuclear arsenals, those trends are essentially all being reversed now. We're seeing that what happens when countries engage in great power competition is that you get this destabilizing action-reaction security dynamic, where one country does something to increase its own security, and then another country decides that it needs to sort of circumvent that, and by doing so, build something that the first country perceives as threatening. And, you know, one great example of this is in March 2018, President Putin unveiled this big suite of kind of developmental and exotic nuclear delivery systems. Everyone was calling them exotic at the time. And notably, five out of those six new systems were specifically designed

to evade other countries, specifically the United States' missile defenses. And Putin mentioned that many times during his speech. Then, in reference to the United States pulling out of the anti-bullistic missile treaty, Putin added ominously, they kept ignoring us, so listen to us now. At the time, the United States was really undergoing this quite dramatic development of its missile defenses. And so you can sort of see this thread here where countries do something to make themselves less vulnerable and then other countries have to kind of work their way around that.

In recent years, we have also seen the decline and just sort of the general disinterest in arms control writ large, right? The last bilateral strategic arms control treaty, New START, is effectively now dead in the water, right? And multilateral efforts to engage in good faith arms reductions appear to have just sort of completely stagnated. And, you know, I think there are some really important things that we have to think about when it comes to arms control. The first is that we are really suffering in the United States from an imminent decline in arms control expertise and interest when it comes to particularly the legislative branch, right? So, arms control for many, many decades was something that was of immense interest in the U.S. Congress, right?

You would have Congress people taking a very, very active place when it came to arms control negotiations. They would potentially, in some cases, go, you arrived in Moscow to press the Soviet leadership on arms control, particularly the Euromissiles, to do business with Ronald Reagan. This kind of interest in arms control is effectively gone. problem that we're seeing is that Congress is just, as we all know, it's increasingly divided, but it's also increasingly just not particularly interested in exercising its own role with regards to foreign policy. There's just kind of this very knee-jerk reaction to saying, oh, you want to do a treaty with China? Well, China, China are the bad guys, right? They're not being transparent. We can't do a treaty with them. They're not going to stop stealing technology. That's a non-starter. They, you know, they're not going to stop stealing technology. That's a non-starter. They, you know,

they're not going to open up like the WTO requires. I mean, just if you're doing this trade, they're not going to agree to that stuff. So how can you get a deal done? But, you know, during the Cold War,

we were dealing with very similar types of adversaries and everyone recognized that making nuclear arms control deals with those countries, right, talking to them, was incredibly important. And, you know, it would help if also Russia and China wanted to talk to us too, right? But what we really do want to see is these countries engaging with each other a lot

more openly. And unfortunately, that's, I feel like we're going very much in the opposite direction. This dynamic has really significant implications for that security dilemma that I just mentioned, right? So instead of dealing with an action-reaction dynamic between two states, we now have to worry about three, and really we have to worry about nine, right? So we have these three, like, big nuclear powers, but there are several other nuclear-armed countries that all have their own interests and their own agency when it comes to nuclear weapons. And very importantly, each of them comes with their own border conflicts.

They each come with their own potentially irrational leaders with their fingers on the nuclear button. You have different technologies, different electoral systems, different levels of transparency. And this is the nuclear world that we live in now. That was Matt Korda. He counts nuclear weapons at the Nuclear Information Project. Coming up, strategery in a tripolar nuclear world. Thank you. and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions

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This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props, or combine your bets in a same-game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout. We'll be right back. located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Dr. Oppenheimer, from all that you have said, it seems that when you contemplate the future, it is more with hope than with pessimism. Or is that an oversimplification? Yes, I've tried to talk about the hopeful things. The unhopeful ones jump to everyone's mind. Will the Chinese change their views of human destiny and of the relations between them New American Security and the Hudson Institute, where he's a nuclear weapons expert and expertise which unsurprisingly generates some dark thoughts. You have the potential to obliterate societies, whole societies, and to do so very quickly.

Because of that, an enormous amount of effort, brainpower, material resources have been devoted to making sure that the use of nuclear weapons is deterred. And today, the challenge is a tripolar system, how to avoid it, and if we can't, how to ensure that deterrence holds. What is nuclear deterrence? The objective is to keep your adversary from doing something you don't want them to do, which is conduct a nuclear attack against you. So I deter you if I convince you that the cost you would incur by attacking me would outweigh any gains that you might hope to make by such an attack. In the bipolar nuclear era, when there were two big powers, the U.S. and the USSR, what were the guiding principles that governed deterrence?

Well, two key features that were associated with deterrence. One was parity, which means each side has roughly the same number of nuclear weapons. So there's no perception that either side has any kind of advantage. And of course, deterrence is very much about perception. It's not what you think. It's what you're trying to create in the mind of your adversary. And so you don't want to give your adversary the impression that they have any kind of advantage, any kind of incentive to attack you. So that's parity. The other was assured destruction. And assured destruction basically says, if you conduct a surprise attack against me, even in the case of a surprise attack,

after your attack, I'll still have sufficient numbers of nuclear weapons to destroy you as a society. And this is kind of what Oppenheimer, who's now famous in the movies again, he described it as two scorpions in a bottle. As he said, one could destroy the other by stinging it, but only at the risk of incurring its own destruction. How did this play out in real life? Well, two examples. One, I guess, is the Cuban Missile Crisis. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. And at that time, the Russians were at a major disadvantage in terms of the number of nuclear weapons, so they did not have parity with the United States. And at the time, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, sought to catch up in a hurry by

placing shorter-range nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, where they could actually strike the United States. Each of these missiles, in short, is capable of striking Washington, D.C., the Panama Canal, Cape Canaveral, Mexico City, or any other city in the southeastern part of the United States. What happened, of course, in the crisis was President Kennedy threatened, in a sense, to go to war unless the Russians withdrew those missiles, which they did. But there's a story that after the Russians were embarrassed in this way, a Soviet diplomat said to an American, you'll never be able to do this to us again.

And so the importance of parity, they engaged in a major nuclear buildup to the point where eventually we had this rough parity, as they called it, that was more or less enshrined in the arms control agreements that we began to negotiate in the early 1970s. And in terms of assured destruction, in the late 1950s, as the Russians began to build up their arsenal, there was a concern, well, what happens when they can actually attack the United States and destroy it? We began to worry about what would happen in the event of a surprise attack. And that led to discussions of assured destruction.

How many weapons would need to survive such an attack for us to credibly be able to threaten the Soviet Union with its own destruction? Again, the two scorpions in a bottle. And, of course, when the Soviets caught up to us, when we had parity, the term mutual assured destruction. Again, the two scorpions in a bottle. And of course, when the Soviets caught up to us, when we had parity, the term mutual assured destruction. And of course, the acronym, Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, MAD, seemed to fit, given the horrors that any kind of a nuclear war on a large scale would inflict on society. All right. So if we move forward a couple of decades, we're now in a situation where there are three major nuclear powers, the U.S., Russia, no longer the USSR, Russia and China. It seems like if you're observing this with no expertise,

it seems like if you just take these principles, parity and assured destruction, you could apply them to three countries now. Is that right? Well, the first point is the Chinese have not yet built up to Russian and American levels. So we have some time to think this through and the implications. But the projections right now is that they will seek to match us in terms of nuclear capability. The problem when you move from two powers to three nuclear powers, three large nuclear powers, is that parity and assured destruction become much more difficult to achieve. So it's been compared, or at least I've compared it,

to the astrophysics problem, which is called the three-body problem. You can calculate the future movement of two celestial systems relatively easy, so it's called sort of a stable system. If you bring a third celestial body, it becomes a very wicked or very complicated or unstable problem in terms of calculations. And certainly that's the case with respect to moving from a bipolar to a tripolar system. So when you think about parity, let's assume that each country has 100 nuclear weapons.

And again, this is a simplistic example, Russia, China, the United States. For any of the three to have parity, you would have to have 200 weapons. That would imply that we would have 200, the Russians and the Chinese would each have 100. Well, if they are seeking parity, they're going to build up to 200. And of course, you then create this dynamic where it's kind of the Red Queens race in Alice in Wonderland, where you run faster and faster, you build more and more weapons, but you never get to a situation where all three countries can have parity. And then you could apply this to assured destruction. In the early 1960s, when we began to really worry about this,

our Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, said, well, we would need at least 400 weapons to survive an attack. Well, let's go back to our simple example. Each country has 100. And say we would need 40 weapons to survive an attack. That's just against one power. How many would we need to survive against an attack by both powers? Well, probably more than 40. So we'd have to build up to achieve that residual number that we could have in the event of, say, two surprise attacks. And so, again, you get back to this arms race dynamic

where the three sides begin to build up their arsenals to ensure that they have this assured destruction, this residual force, and they never quite make it because the other two are building at the same time. What should nuclear deterrence strategy look like in a tripolar era? Well, that's kind of the $64 question. Just again, to use our simple example, the way nuclear forces are structured now, it's possible to use one nuclear weapon to take out many. And so, for example, if you look at the our nuclear forces, they're basically built around three elements that's called a triad. One are submarines that are deployed under the, obviously under the water

with nuclear weapons, another are nuclear armed bombers, and the third are land-based missiles. And one of the problems we run into is that at any given time, a good proportion of these submarines are at the two major submarine bases that we have, and that our bombers are at one of five different airfields. So for a very few number of nuclear weapons, an attacker can take out an enormous number of our nuclear weapons, theoretically. And so there's, in a crisis, there could be this incentive to attack. The analogy is the two gunfighters in the old westerns, the incentive to draw first is very high. Because if you draw first, if you attack first, using a relatively small number of nuclear weapons, you can take out an enormous number of the other side. And so one possibility is to emphasize strategies where

the attacker has to use more than one weapon to take out one of yours. And one of the possibilities being explored right now is land-based missiles. So we have these missile fields out in the Midwest, the northern Midwest, and each of these missiles has one warhead on it, one nuclear weapon. In testimony before Congress, the Defense secretary has said it could take between two and four weapons to be certain that you've taken out this one missile. So go back to our 100 each example. We each have 100 nuclear weapons. If it takes you two or three or four to take out one of mine, then you're actually depleting your nuclear arsenal by attacking me at a faster rate than you're actually reducing mine. And that could enhance deterrence, even in a three nuclear power situation, because it shifts the advantage from the attacker to the defender.

Can anyone, do you think at this point, convince China that making more nuclear weapons, wanting more nuclear weapons, is not only not in its best interest, but not in the best interest of the rest of the world? I mean, is there any way back from this? I think if you look at Chinese behavior, they're in the third decade of their military buildup, and they have tried to match us in terms of military capability in every area, whether it's stealth aircraft or nuclear powered submarines or aircraft carriers, satellites, artificial intelligence, and so on, cyber warfare. So it's very difficult to see why they wouldn't want to match us in terms of what

many people call the ultimate weapon, nuclear weapons. I think you're absolutely right to say we need to really put some of our best brains to work on how we might dissuade the Chinese from going down this path. But right now, it's a very wicked problem in the sense that not only is there no obvious solution, there's not even, in my estimation, any clear path to how you would get to one. That was Dr. Andrew Krepenovich. Today's episode was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and edited by Matthew Collette.

It was engineered by Michael Rayfield and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.