Given the number of actors with serious intent, the accessibility of weapons or nuclear materials from which elementary weapons could be constructed, and the almost limitless ways in which terrorists could smuggle a weapon through American borders …. In my own considered judgment, on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not.2
A number of analysts treated this skeptically. John Mueller claimed that the chance of a successful nuclear terrorist attack was not even one in a million. The challenges that any terrorist group would need to overcome were quite formidable, and no doubt deterred them from expending considerable effort. Michael Levi observed that simply focusing on the ‘first line of defense’—e.g. securing nuclear materials—was counterproductive and misdiagnosed the nature of the problem. Instead, Levi posed the questions of how could terrorists obtain and detonate a nuclear weapon, and what obstacles they would need to overcome. Any terrorist plot would consist of numerous steps in the process of acquiring the fissile material for an intact nuclear weapon, building or activating the weapon and then delivering it—and included many essential elements—expertise, organization, coordination, funding, ability to avoid detection, and so forth. The important point to note was that the oft-repeated contention that terrorists only needed to succeed once should be flipped on its head; it was not the terrorists who had to succeed only once but the defence. Thus, although a frightening prospect for many countries, particularly given the nature of groups such as Al Qaeda and later ISIS, the probability of successful nuclear terrorism was very low.3 Although Allison’s fears were not realized in the time frame he set, the underlying anxiety remained.4
One of those influenced by these concerns was Barack Obama. When running for president in 2008, he stated in a campaign advertisement, ‘The single most important national security threat that we face is nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists’.5 Rather than being simply a problem in its own right, nuclear terrorism was linked to Obama’s stated interest in disarmament. He was not alone in making this connection. For instance, the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ of former senior policy-makers made their case for ‘verifiable global nuclear disarmament’ based in large part on the need to counter the ‘specter of nuclear terrorism’. According to their argument, ‘non-state terrorist groups with nuclear weapons’ were ‘outside the bounds of a deterrent strategy’. Arms control and disarmament advocates discursively associated their cause with the benefits it would provide in reducing this risk. But the disarmament agenda did not advance very far during the Obama presidency. Meantime, due to the increasing civilian use of nuclear power, the amount of nuclear materials available that potential terrorists might seek to acquire, was growing.
Thus, alongside disarmament, which at best was aspirational, Obama pursued the more immediate step of raising the profile throughout the international community of nuclear security and preventing terrorists from acquiring nuclear materials. To achieve this goal, the US sponsored a series of four Nuclear Security Summits during 2010–2016—held up by the administration as one of their top achievements in the nuclear field. The ‘Gang of Four’, though supporting the commitments that were made at these summits to improve security, nevertheless believed the more important goal to pursue was a ‘global system’ for ‘tracking, accounting for, managing, and securing all weapons-usable nuclear materials’—a system which there was little sign of by the time the series of summits concluded.6
Despite the emphasis on the potential for terrorists to acquire a nuclear weapon, critics also noted that the fear generated by this threat was a distraction from the more dangerous prospect of a nuclear war between states. So long as the policy focus was on terrorism and counter-insurgency—Obama stepped up the US effort in 2009 in Afghanistan—this more traditional set of concerns tended to get played down. But the inconclusive and long duration wars in Afghanistan and Iraq generated wariness about engaging in these sorts of conflicts in the future. The preferred approach taken when dealing with terrorists and insurgents began to be one that was relatively low-key and cost-free, with advisory teams, Special Forces, and drones replacing the brigades, divisions, and corps that bore the brunt of fighting from 2001. Even with the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2013–2014, there was little appetite to return to the large-scale approach that had characterized the counterinsurgencies of the previous decade. Having been drawn into major ground commitments following the regime changes in Kabul and Baghdad, when it came to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 the reluctance to take on any more commitments of this kind was palpable. This was further confirmed by the cautious approach taken by Washington to the Syrian civil war. Western policymakers were now skeptical of the ability of military interventions to produce positive outcomes. It would always be a challenge for outside powers to impose their preferences if they were unwilling to accept a major long-term military commitment with costs quite disproportionate to the political stakes involved, and with no guarantee of a successful outcome.
At the end of 2011, the administration announced a ‘pivot’, later renamed a ‘re-balancing’, to the Asia-Pacific. This effort was intended to prioritize this region in US national security policy, and to reassure allies wary of a rising China. As the US was focused on the Middle East and Central Asia in the 2000s, the Chinese economy had grown increasingly powerful. This led to a more activist foreign policy and higher defence expenditure. It was Russia, however, that did most to encourage a revival in geopolitical thinking. A growing Russian discontent with the state of affairs in Europe had been evident for some time as a result of the expansion of both NATO and the EU not only into the old Warsaw Pact but also into the former Soviet space. In March 2014 Russia annexed Crimea as a response to a popular movement in Ukraine which ousted a pro-Russian president. It also supported separatist groups in eastern Ukraine and presented a menacing face towards those who objected.7
Post-Soviet Russia’s relationship with nuclear weapons, strategy and arms control was at first dominated as much by the issue of great power pride as it was the need to compensate for the weakness of its conventional forces. In 1987 the journalist Xan Smiley described the Soviet Union as ‘Upper Volta with rockets’, a phrase that soon acquired a wide circulation being attributed to, among others, the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Margaret Thatcher.8 In the economic chaos following the break-up of the Soviet Union, the new Russian Federation struggled even to afford the rockets as well as a nuclear infrastructure and large military. Yet as Russia’s fortunes collapsed in the 1990s, the political and symbolic value of its nuclear arsenal increased as the chief means by which it could still claim great power status. This was a theme Russian leaders enunciated for both domestic and foreign audiences. It was often displayed in the scenarios of Russian military exercises and in repeated flights of its nuclear-capable bombers. By the 2010s, as Russia gradually recovered its strength and appeared more menacing, nuclear weapons conversely became less prominent in Russian strategy documents relative to other non-nuclear and non-military tools, although the posturing and threats continued, leading many observers to conclude otherwise.
Beginning in 1993, Moscow abandoned the Soviet-era policy of ‘no first use’ should it be confronted by a large-scale attack that threatened Russia’s sovereignty and survival. At that time, nuclear use was contemplated only in the context of a global war, rather than a regional or local one—a contingency that was viewed as remote. As the 1990s progressed, the major geopolitical challenge Russia faced was the enlargement of NATO, specifically the inclusion of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. As a result of the 1999 Kosovo conflict that involved NATO attacks against Russia’s ally Serbia despite the initial lack of UN Security Council approval, Russian leaders increasingly discussed the potential threat of a similar NATO ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the former Soviet-space. This included the possibility that NATO would intervene in the Chechen conflict. A key consequence of this concern was that the idea of escalating a regional conflict with nuclear weapons in order to de-escalate it grew in prominence in the Russian discourse. In other words, to compensate for Russia’s conventional inferiority in any large-scale conflict with NATO, Moscow would reserve the right to employ nuclear weapons first. Different ways of ‘escalating to de-escalate’ were enunciated, ranging from isolated demonstration explosions to attacks on military targets, albeit with a loose definition of what constituted the geographical limits of any nuclear action. Russia’s notion of a nuclear response could include relevant military targets, such as bomber bases, that were located thousands of miles away. The choice of target was linked to the idea of ‘calibrated’ or ‘pre-determined’ strikes—i.e. commensurate to the level of conflict—rather than ‘unacceptable’ damage. This ‘regional’ nuclear use could also be augmented to include a demonstration of willingness to employ strategic nuclear weapons.9
In the 2000s, in addition to the dual fears about NATO’s continued enlargement combined with the risk of a potential NATO intervention in the former Soviet space, two further strategic concerns emerged for Russian policymakers. The first had to do with the development of US missile defense plans, both national and regional, that occurred with the American withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. Missile defence was problematic for Russia due to the belief that this undermined strategic stability, placing Russia in an inferior position where it might become vulnerable to a debilitating first strike.10 Having already made significant reductions in its strategic nuclear forces, whether out of choice or necessity, Russia’s deterrence calculation of what was required to inflict ‘unacceptable damage’ to the US was set as a fraction of what it had been formerly. This led to the argument that should the US launch a first strike Russia’s already reduced ability to retaliate would be further diminished by a missile defense system. A related ‘threat’, identified most prominently by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, was of a purely conventional disarming US strike against Russia that could be implemented in a matter of hours.11 At the same time Russian leaders publicly claimed that the country either possessed or was procuring new means to overcome or bypass missile defences, ensuring that its second-strike capability would remain credible. Regardless, Moscow remained firmly opposed to American missile defenses.12 Even if the vulnerability argument was discounted, missile defence created a perception of Russian weakness that Moscow was keen to reverse. Russia tried numerous methods to try to halt the expansion of missile defence into Europe, including by making nuclear threats against those countries hosting the infrastructure, but these efforts were unsuccessful.13 As Putin reluctantly admitted, ‘Despite our numerous protests and pleas, the American machine has been set into motion, the conveyer belt is moving forward’.14 Beyond the missile defence issue, Russian use of nuclear threats as a means of coercion, of which there were a number over the course of the post-Soviet period, seem to have had little impact in achieving their stated purpose, but nonetheless encouraged a view of Russia as potentially reckless.15
The Kremlin’s second major strategic concern was that Western-inspired and supported ‘colour revolutions’ of the sort that occurred in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, might also occur in Russia. This type of subversive security threat was not one that could be deterred by nuclear means. Nuclear weapons would still retain a fundamental role in Russia’s overall ‘strategic deterrence’ but non-nuclear and non-military means would assume increasing importance. By the time of the publication of post-Soviet Russia’s third military doctrine in 2010, the role of nuclear weapons had remained relatively stagnant relative to the 2000 version, whereas conventional forces received more emphasis. Suggestions that were made during the drafting of this document to lower the threshold for nuclear use from ‘regional’ conflicts to ‘local’ ones were rejected. In 2014, a fourth military doctrine was issued which introduced the concept of non-nuclear deterrence. This was a further indication that as Russia’s conventional military regained its strength, and as Russia employed a wider range of non-military tools in pursuit of its foreign policy interests, the relative importance of nuclear weapons would be reduced. At the very least, the emphasis on non-nuclear deterrence options—for instance, the use of long-range cruise or ballistic missiles as a final warning—would delay the need for a quick escalation to nuclear use.16
With the 2014 Crimea annexation, Russia appeared more threatening than at any other time since the collapse of the USSR, principally due to its perceived ability to engage in subversive activities along its periphery that were bolstered by the significant conventional and nuclear escalatory potential it could bring to bear. Against the backdrop of a mushroom cloud one Russian commentator observed, as the Crimean crisis broke, that ‘Russia is the only country that could really turn the US into radioactive ashes’.17 In August 2014, as Russian forces were fighting directly in Ukraine, President Putin warned other countries that it was ‘best not to mess with us,’ with a reminder that ‘Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers’.18 Russia had finally come full circle. Unlike during the 1990s when the danger was bound up with Russian weakness, now the threat was once again one of Russian strength.19 With the post-2014 resurgent ‘Russia threat’, many Western commentators began developing military scenarios of a Russian conquest of the Baltic States in which the earlier ‘escalate to de-escalate’ ideas were now deemed applicable and requiring NATO preparations. In these scenarios, Russia, despite its conventional ability to overrun these countries, was not powerful enough to counter a NATO effort to recover them, and therefore employed non-strategic nuclear weapons to avoid losing its recently acquired gains.20 According to one report Russia warned US Secretary of Defense Mattis in 2017 that if there was a war in the Baltics, Russia would not ‘hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons against NATO.’21
The concept of ‘escalate to de-escalate’ strayed from Russia’s declared policy which emphasized its red-line for nuclear escalation being if an adversary’s conventional weapons ‘threaten the very existence of the state’.22 Many analysts also invoked the analogy of ‘flexible response’ when describing it—in other words, Russia would compensate for its conventional inferiority by a limited use of nuclear weapons to quickly terminate the conflict. But whereas NATO might have used nuclear weapons to prevent its territory from being overrun, in the Baltic scenario it was being used to refer to the possibility of nuclear use by an aggressor to retain control over territory that had just been seized. Thus the prospect of a twenty-first century ‘Hamburg grab’ re-emerged in NATO scenarios, albeit the fundamental risks associated with such an endeavour, which no doubt limited the Soviet willingness to pursue it during the Cold War, and presumably were just as applicable in the post-Cold War period, received little attention. Regardless of the interpretations of Russian nuclear doctrine as applied to a potential Russia-NATO conflict, they sparked discussion about NATO’s response to this threat. A comparison could be made with Kahn’s concept of ‘escalation dominance’, in which one side moves the conflict to a level which is most painful for the other, assuming that the other would not then dare to move on to an even more dangerous next step. In this case, by concentrating on short-range low yield nuclear weapons, an area of Russian advantage, they would put the onus on NATO to accept the risks of further escalation. This scenario was used in American debates to justify increasing the number of low-yield nuclear options as a counter, although that assumed, as with many similar discussions, that any responses would have to be confined to similar types of weapons.
By 2015, US officials were describing Russia as the ‘top threat’, with China ranking second and terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State lower down the list.23 Within NATO, reassuring allies and deterring conflict with a resurgent Russia took on a sense of urgency. Suddenly less urgent were the post-Cold War ‘out of area’ threats that had dominated the Alliance’s attention throughout most of the period. Two features stood out about this ‘return’ to great power rivalry. At the same time Western military establishments were expected to shift their focus, there was little political interest in rethinking the size and structures of these establishments, all the more so if it meant adding to the financial burden. Perhaps more importantly, the internal crises that were rocking members of the alliance, on both sides of the Atlantic, often exacerbated by Russia, seemed to produce a paradox in which the military might become better able to deter military aggression whilst the political divisions within NATO were being aggravated, thereby potentially hampering authorization of any collective military response.
Despite the major shifts that occurred in NATO since the end of the Cold War, with its enlargement combined with some projection of conventional military power beyond its original area, there was a remarkable degree of continuity in terms of nuclear policy. In particular in various official documents there was no movement in relation to the role of extended deterrence. This was referred to in NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept as the ‘supreme guarantee of the security of the Allies’. The Alliance would remain the beneficiary of the extended nuclear deterrence provided by the United States and the United Kingdom and to a degree France. France’s nuclear doctrine remained national in focus although it acknowledged a wider deterrent benefit. As the nuclear policies of all three states remained a national prerogative it was therefore out-of-bounds to collective decision-making. The decisions taken by these governments to reduce or modernize their arsenals after the Cold War may have been influenced by Alliance considerations about the utility of extended deterrence, but any influence that manifested itself at the national level was limited to pleas for retaining the nuclear status quo rather than arguments for change. In essence, the NATO policy that it would remain a nuclear alliance so long as nuclear weapons existed was merely a reflection of the nuclear policies of the US, UK, and France.
To the extent any significant debate within the Alliance occurred, this was limited to NATO’s ‘sub-strategic’24 arsenal of B-61 nuclear gravity bombs, with some countries arguing for retention and others for abandoning them. The origins of the term lay in a desire to avoid the adjective ‘tactical’ while indicating that these were not weapons for the most important enemy targets. At the end of the Cold War, the US unilaterally decided to withdraw the majority of its short-range nuclear weapons from Europe. Notably, this decision was only briefed to NATO allies at a bilateral-level rather than being the result of a collective decision. The withdrawal consisted of all those nuclear weapons associated with artillery shells and short-range ballistic missiles. Air-delivered bombs, though reduced, were not entirely withdrawn, with some 200 remaining by the mid-1990s. The fate of this sub-strategic arsenal generated a great deal of commentary. In many respects, it constituted a ‘straw man’ for arms control and disarmament advocates who questioned why the Alliance continued to retain a nuclear arsenal that was widely regarded as ‘militarily obsolete’ under any plausible scenario, with the lack of movement on this issue being held up as an example of the non-strategic motivations underpinning the retention of redundant nuclear weapons more generally. By contrast, advocates for retaining the arsenal pointed to its political and symbolic value in sustaining the trans-Atlantic link, fostering burden-sharing, and acting as a bargaining counter to encourage reductions of Russia’s tactical nuclear arsenal. To the extent deterrence was used as a justification, vague reference was made to its contribution as part of the wider extended nuclear deterrent to ensuring uncertainty in the mind of a potential aggressor.25
With Russia’s actions in Ukraine beginning in 2014, there was even less incentive to alter NATO’s nuclear policy. In the 2010 Strategic Concept the nuclear status quo had been re-affirmed. It was again in the Alliance’s 2012 Deterrence and Defence Posture Review. The latter document stressed the utility of nuclear weapons, conventional forces, and missile defence in NATO’s overall posture. Decisions about the modernization of NATO’s sub-strategic arsenal were also made prior to 2014. Thus, the importance of the resurgent Russia threat was to reinforce pre-existing trends in NATO nuclear policy rather than alter them in any significant way, and make any future decision to abandon sub-strategic weapons that much harder to justify. Nevertheless, there was an important shift in how NATO viewed deterrence and defence. Whereas prior to 2014, only scant attention had been given to the prospect of a Russian conventional attack on the Baltic States, after the Crimea annexation, this scenario became one of NATO’s chief concerns.26
long standing British government policy that if our forces—if our people—were threatened by weapons of mass destruction we would reserve the right to use appropriate proportionate responses which might… in extreme circumstances include the use of nuclear weapons.28
we deliberately maintain ambiguity about precisely when, how and at what scale we would contemplate use of our nuclear deterrent. We will not simplify the calculations of a potential aggressor by defining more precisely the circumstances in which we might consider the use of our nuclear capabilities. Hence, we will not rule in or out the first use of nuclear weapons.29
The basic idea was that any future aggressor would have to calculate the damage Britain could inflict in response to aggression. The nature of the hypothetical adversary and the type of aggression to be deterred was mostly irrelevant to this argument which made it hard to judge whether the British deterrent would be sufficient. Meantime, the UK had a choice between alternative nuclear postures—a continuous deterrent or a focused one maintained at reduced readiness in the absence of a specific threat. Whereas the former would keep the existing system in place, any change that might allow for more flexibility also potentially required rethinking fundamental assumptions about the most appropriate systems and how many—a logical impossibility given the unknown nature of future threats. Set against the backdrop of this debate about retaining nuclear weapons was the UK interest in being seen as a leading nuclear disarmer, or as Colin Gray put it ‘running with the nuclear fox and riding with the disarmament hounds’.30 A reduced posture could increasing the UK’s diplomatic leverage in the cause of disarmament while still enabling it to deploy an ‘assured’ retaliatory capability should a major nuclear threat re-emerge. Instead, the status quo was preferred. Britain stayed with the sort of force it knew best and decided to invest in a third-generation submarine-based system.
France’s post-Cold War nuclear policy also led to a reduced capability. Having abandoned land-based systems, the French deterrent now consisted only of a continuous-at-sea presence plus air-delivered weapons. As the capability reduced, however, the roles of the remaining force increased. Whereas the long-standing purpose of its nuclear deterrent had been to deter a stronger power (the USSR) from attacking it, the reverse was now the case. France would use its nuclear weapons to deter weaker countries—regional powers and rogue states—from using WMD, or threatening to use them, in an effort to prevent French intervention in distant conflicts. Thus, nuclear weapons became viewed as a means to facilitate military intervention, to act as a counter-deterrent, or counter-blackmail capability, that could ensure freedom of action for France’s conventional forces. This was an interesting justification, but overstated what could then be achieved with conventional forces. In fact, for both France and Britain, military interventions of any significance were more likely to be held back because of the weaknesses of both countries’ power projection capabilities, combined with a limited political appetite to employ them except alongside the US.31
Nevertheless, this line of reasoning was employed to justify France’s retention of its nuclear arsenal as well as modernizing it to provide weapons with greater accuracy, a lower yield and longer range. Instead of attacking cities, as had been the intention with the Soviet Union, France now wanted more ‘tailored’ options when faced with the leaders of rogue states. French nuclear weapons had to be able to threaten the enemy’s ‘centres of power’, loosely defined as a target valued by the enemy leadership other than a city. Again, as was the case with Britain, there was some question about why France needed to maintain a continuous-at-sea deterrent, rather than reduce its nuclear posture. In 2015, French President François Hollande addressed this criticism, by stating, ‘By definition deterrence applies permanently. What would mean an intermittent deterrence?’32
In both the British and French cases, the argument about a permanent deterrent seemed to rest more on the grounds that re-constituting a recessed deterrent was more complicated than retaining the existing one, than it did on any strategic logic about deterring a bolt-from-the blue attack by an unknown adversary. The argument that a major new threat might emerge, with nuclear weapons serving as ‘life insurance’, pre-supposed that a major adversary might emerge at some future date, not that it existed in the present. It was also claimed that France needed to retain its nuclear capability because it still had little confidence in the US extended deterrent through its NATO membership. Even after re-entering the NATO military command structure in 2009 it refused to join the Alliance’s Nuclear Planning Group. Regardless, France had been one of the few opponents within NATO of the Alliance abandoning its arsenal of air-delivered nuclear weapons. This position might have been related to more general fears about reducing the prestige of nuclear weapons as this had potential connotations for its own status as a great power, and more specifically to the questions that would then be raised about the utility of France’s air-delivered nuclear capability.
One additional purpose which could be ascribed to the French nuclear arsenal was that of extended deterrence for Europe. There were even proposals floated for a ‘Euro-Deterrent’ in which French nuclear weapons, possibly with those of Britain, would provide EU members with a nuclear deterrent apart from that which was already provided to most of them by NATO. This idea was received with little enthusiasm in both France, which had always insisted that its force was first and foremost for national purposes, and among allies, because it was clearly second best to the established US guarantee. Despite the enormous conceptual and practical hurdles involved, the idea continued to occasionally resurface, most prominently in Germany, but remained something of a ‘phantom debate’.33
Although Russia’s continued preoccupation with the nuclear issue went together with its concern about its status as a great power, China’s rise as a great power was combined with a relatively low-key approach to its nuclear posture. Beijing made heavy investments in military modernization, but there were very few changes to its nuclear policy. In many fundamental respects, the collapse of the USSR had less of an impact on China’s trajectory than the death of Mao and the subsequent reforms of Deng Xiaoping. This was especially evident with the evolution of strategic studies in China. Under Mao discussions about nuclear strategy and arms control were tightly controlled at the political level and there was little professional expertise in this area.34 It was only in the late-1970s and early-1980s that such expertise was encouraged. New ideas were gradually reflected in China’s nuclear strategy and operational plans, most notably The Science of Operations of the Second Artillery.35 The terminology of Chinese strategic discourse also changed. ‘Deterrence’—translated into Chinese as ‘weishe’—had previously been understood as a Western term referring to ‘coercion’ or ‘compellance’, and was therefore rejected as being inappropriate for a Chinese nuclear policy that stressed no first use. By the early 2000s, ‘deterrence’ eventually made its way into the mainstream of China’s military lexicon, and was incorporated into Beijing’s official statements on nuclear policy.36 The broader threat assessment driving discussions of Chinese nuclear strategy also shifted. It became exceedingly difficult to find Chinese references to Russia or India as presenting a major threat in the way they were once considered to be. Instead, Chinese thinking about nuclear weapons became increasingly tied to the perceived threat from the United States. It was only in the 2010s as India developed longer-range nuclear-capable delivery systems that it received more attention, especially in the broader context of a warming of US-India relations and an American ‘rebalancing’ to the Asia-Pacific.37
Generally speaking, however, the fundamental features of Chinese nuclear policy that had been established under Mao—a commitment to no first use and a relatively small arsenal only capable of assured retaliation to inflict unacceptable damage—remained in place, although a more sophisticated appreciation of nuclear strategy and operational considerations emerged. The problem of survivability received greater attention.38 Throughout this period both China’s nuclear arsenal, as well as that of potential adversaries, continued to evolve. Whereas under Mao, China was only able to deliver nuclear weapons regionally, by the early 1980s, Beijing had acquired a limited ICBM capability, and had experimented, though unsuccessfully, with an SLBM capability. In the subsequent decades, China’s ICBM capability grew only slightly in terms of numbers of missiles, with the main technological emphasis placed on improving survivability and penetrability. China’s continued adherence to a policy of no first use and maintaining a credible nuclear deterrent proved increasingly controversial by the late 1990s-early 2000s with the advances in both US missile defence capabilities and conventional missiles, and these concerns bedeviled Chinese strategic thinkers into the 2010s. In particular, the potentially negative implications for China’s deterrent of US missile defences being located in South Korea, ostensibly only intended to counter North Korea, was a prominent theme. Additional concerns about the future survivability of China’s nuclear deterrent were generated by advances in American intelligence and surveillance systems that potentially could quickly locate China’s nuclear assets and support a conventional ‘prompt global strike’ capability.
There were also debates in China about whether to adopt a ‘launch-on-warning’ policy—a potentially pressing requirement in light of the emerging challenges to its assured retaliation posture, but also highly dangerous due to the inability to distinguish between American nuclear and conventional missiles. Meantime, the value-added of diversifying China’s nuclear assets to rely increasingly on SLBMs was questioned due to concerns about US and Japanese anti-submarine warfare capabilities. There were also debates about whether China should continue to adhere to a policy of ‘minimum deterrence’ and ‘counter-value’ targeting, or whether it must shift to ‘limited deterrence’ that would include, at least at a regional level, a counterforce capability. Rather than reflecting an imminent change in policy, these debates remained confined to hypothetical discussions of future directions for Chinese nuclear strategy.39
In December 2015, the Second Artillery was elevated from an independent branch to a military service and relabeled as the Rocket Force. This rise in status probably reflected the increasing importance of its conventional precision strike role rather than an indication that its nuclear deterrent mission had assumed renewed importance. Indeed, though China’s nuclear weapons had become more technologically advanced, they still remained relatively few in number. Perhaps the most striking thing about China’s nuclear deterrent coinciding with the country’s rise was the lack of a ‘break out’. Rather than developing a nuclear arsenal to match the size of the American or Russian arsenals, China preferred to put much greater investments into its conventional capabilities. Although the United States was increasingly preoccupied with its strategic rivalry with China, Beijing had the option of patiently exploiting its economic strength and growing regional influence to supplant the United States as the predominant regional power. But if matters were likely to come to a head the question of the adequacy of its nuclear deterrent was likely to be raised more regularly.