(yŏuxiàn wēishè)— was eventually included, with explanations like “there is no consensus on the definition” and “in some descriptions it refers to France’s nuclear deterrent.”19Speaking in Prague on April 5, 2009, President Barack Obama committed the United States to seeking what he described as “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Obama omitted any mention of China in this speech, as he did in an earlier speech on the campaign trail. Yet a world without nuclear weapons rests, in no small part, on whether the administration can succeed in creating a stable strategic relationship with China. Moreover, each step in the ambitious agenda he outlined on the road to zero—deeper reductions in warheads and stockpiles, Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials—requires a more sustained engagement with China than is currently in place.
Some in Washington are concerned that deeper U.S. and Russian reductions will spark a Chinese “sprint” to numerical parity with the United States. Others see extended deterrence, particularly its ability to assure Japan, as the most difficult problem in U.S. nuclear strategy. Still others view a crisis over the status of Taiwan as the only probable scenario for a deliberate nuclear exchange involving the United States.
So far, the administration has shown little evidence that it understands the necessity of a fundamental transformation in the U.S.-China strategic relationship, let alone the challenges in attempting such a transformation. The 2010 Nuclear Posture Review maintains the fundamental ambivalence toward China’s status as a nuclear power. If the president seeks a world without nuclear weapons, he must find a way to transform the U.S.-China strategic relationship. This chapter sketches out the challenges posed by ongoing strategic modernization in the United States and China, past efforts to manage strategic stability between the two countries, and a modest agenda for the Obama administration. The fundamental question is whether the United States will accept, as a fact, the reality of China’s deterrent or seek to negate that deterrent through the development of more sophisticated strategic capabilities, including missile defenses and conventional strike.
China and the United States maintain nuclear forces that are extremely different in size, posture, and policy. China’s nuclear stockpile is probably a few hundred nuclear weapons.1 About half of its nuclear weapons are “operationally deployed” for use with ballistic missiles, with the warheads stored separately.2 The remainder of the stockpile is in storage. China has issued a pledge to “never at any time or under any circumstances be the first to use nuclear weapons.” Some observers claim, however, that there is ambiguity in its no-firstuse pledge, pointing to statements in military writings criticizing no first use as inflexible or statements by academics expressing skepticism that the pledge would hold in extremis. To be clear—there is no ambiguity in the official statements. China, as a matter of policy, has sought bilateral and multilateral no-first-use agreements.
China is modernizing its strategic forces, largely through the deployment of solid-fueled ballistic missiles. In the 1980s, it focused on developing solid-fueled, mobile ballistic missiles to replace its first generation of ballistic missiles. Although it deployed the first of these new missiles, the DF-21, beginning in the early 1990s, flight testing on the DF-21 continued through the 1990s, and China did not begin large-scale deployments in earnest until around 2000. The first brigades of road-mobile variants—the DF-31 and the DF-31A—became operational in 2007 and 2008, respectively.
China is also developing a submarine-launched variant of the DF-31, called the JL-2, and has put to sea a new class of ballistic missile submarines, one of which was on display during a fleet review in Qingdao in April 2009. The Office of Naval Intelligence believes China may build as many as five of the new submarines to replace its lone Xia-class SSBN, which is not believed to be operational. China appears to have rather limited capabilities for communicating with submarines at sea and probably has not established operational practices for conducting deterrent patrols. The United States expected the JL-2 missile to become operational in 2010, but it failed its final round of flight tests and the future of the program is uncertain.
The growth in China’s ballistic missile arsenal is not confined to its nuclear forces. It has also developed new conventionally armed solid-fuel short-range ballistic missiles, the DF-11 and DF-15, which are deployed in very large numbers near Taiwan. China has also deployed a conventional variant of the DF-21, the DF-21C, which is also the basis of a conventionally armed antiship ballistic missile. (The DF-21 may also be the basis of China’s hit-to-kill interceptor tested against an orbiting Chinese satellite in January 2007 and in an anti–ballistic missile mode in January 2010.) Finally, China has also deployed a new land-attack cruise missile—the ground-launched DH-10—as part of a broad effort to acquire ground-, air-, and sea-launched cruise missiles.3
This process of replacing liquid-fueled ballistic missiles with solid-fueled ballistic and cruise missiles underpins China’s ongoing strategic modernization. Although many observers have linked the deployment of the DF-31 and DF-31A to recent U.S. missile defense deployments, it is important to keep in mind that these programs date to the mid-1980s and were to have been completed many years ago.
Some observers worry that these developments could result in a dramatic increase in the number of Chinese nuclear weapons, as well as an abandonment of China’s no-first-use posture. This is part of a concern that China is moving toward a posture that might be called “limited deterrence.” The idea that China might move away from a minimum deterrent to a posture that more closely resembles that of the United States is long-standing: the theme of moving toward greater operational flexibility appears in early analyses of China’s nascent nuclear doctrine by RAND’s Alice Langley Hsieh.4 In the late 1980s, the term “limited deterrence” began to populate military journals and books from scholars associated with the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences (AMS), National Defense University, General Staff Department, and Second Artillery. Some scholars anticipated China would move toward this posture, which would permit it to use its strategic forces in limited nuclear war–fighting roles. Beijing was expected to significantly increase the size, mobility, flexibility, and diversity of Chinese strategic forces. Others anticipated that China would abandon its no-first-use pledge.
Is China’s deterrent evolving away from what a senior Chinese official once described as “the minimum means of reprisal”? It seems clear that China will increase the size of its nuclear forces—for example, it appears to have established new brigades to operate the DF-31 and DF-31A, rather than converting existing units. How much that indicates about China’s deterrent posture, how ever, is an open question. It remains to be seen whether China will increase the number of nuclear warheads as much as current U.S. intelligence community predictions—which anticipate very large increases in Chinese nuclear forces to respond to U.S. missile defense efforts—project. In 2001, the U.S. intelligence community asserted that the number of Chinese warheads capable of reaching the United States could grow to 75 to 100 by 2015.5 In 2006, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center warned that the number of Chinese nuclear warheads that could reach the United States “could expand to well over 100 in the next 15 years.”6
Such an expansion would require not merely the production of additional missiles and nuclear warheads. In discussing U.S. estimates that China might deploy as many as 200 ICBMs, Ken Allen and Maryanne Kivlehan-Wise caution that we need to be mindful of the organizational requirements of such a transformation. “From an organizational perspective, an increase from the current 18–20 ICBMs to 200 would mean increasing the number of brigades from the existing two to about twenty brigades,” they write. “If this were the case, the PLA would most likely have to create several new bases with multiple brigades per base, acquire all of the requisite equipment, and train the necessary enlisted and officer force. The question remains whether this is realistic.”7
A force of more than a hundred ICBMs, deployed on both road-mobile and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, seems more consistent with a small, retaliatory force rather than a limited war–fighting capability. The most important measure is probably the operational patterns of these forces. By all indications, Chinese nuclear warheads are not normally mated to their missiles. Robert Walpole, then National Intelligence Officer for Strategic and Nuclear Programs, stated in 1998 that “China keeps its missiles unfueled and without warheads mated.”8 The warheads are stored at nearby, but separate, bases.9 Press reports of Chinese mobile ballistic missile exercises, carried by the Xinhua News Agency, indicate that nuclear warheads would be mated in the field to mobile ballistic missiles before launch, similar to the procedure used by Soviet “Mobile Technical Rocket Bases” (PRTB in Russian) stationed in East Germany and elsewhere during the Cold War.10 Anecdotal evidence from public descriptions of Chinese exercises and doctrinal materials suggest that Chinese forces expend considerable effort training to conduct retaliatory missions in the harsh environment after a nuclear strike.11
It would seem likely that once its ballistic missile submarines become operational, China will deploy them to sea with nuclear warheads, as do France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. On the other hand, there are alternative models. Russia, for instance, does not maintain “continuous at sea deterrence”—the practice of keeping at least one submarine on combat patrol at all times. In recent years, the number of Russian ballistic missile submarine patrols—probably conducted for training purposes—detected by the United States Navy has varied widely. Just as China seems reluctant to send mobile launch companies into the field with nuclear weapons, it may choose not to maintain continuous at-sea deterrence, despite the expectations of those in the United States and elsewhere.
Indeed, Chinese officials seem to view placing forces on alert as an important signaling measure. The 2009 National Defense White Paper makes clear that, in a crisis, China would place its nuclear forces in a state of alert. This echoes an earlier document that describes alert operations to demonstrate will—what it calls “counter-nuclear deterrence”—as an important phase in nuclear operations.
Chinese posture is extremely different from that of the United States. The U.S. nuclear stockpile is believed to number about 5,000 nuclear weapons. About 1,000 of these warheads—those on silo-based missiles and submarines at sea—are on “day-to-day” alert. These are the most ready of a larger “operationally deployed” force of 2,200 warheads which includes warheads on submarines and in storage at bomber bases and which can be brought to a generated alert over the course of days. These numbers are decreasing, as the United States and Russia continue the process of negotiated reductions.
Like China, the United States is making significant changes in its strategic forces. As part of the “new triad,” the United States has pursued ballistic missile defense capabilities and conventional strike. It has deployed ground-based midcourse interceptors in Alaska, and it is pursuing a number of conventional strike capabilities, initially on modified D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles carried by Ohio-class submarines. These capabilities are pointedly not constrained by the U.S.-Russian strategic arms control regime, nor by any other legally binding instrument.
China is not the primary driver of these changes—although they are deeply disconcerting to some Chinese strategists. Similarly, these changes are not the primary drivers of China’s development of solid-fueled ballistic missiles, which is a long-standing effort that predates both the mid-1990s decline in U.S.-China relations, as well as recent developments of current missile defense and conventional strike systems. This is not to suggest that missile defense and other aspects of U.S. strategic modernization have no effect on Chinese decisions, or vice versa. China has developed and flight-tested a sophisticated suite of penetration aids for the DF-21 and DF-31 family of ballistic missiles.12 Some Chinese specialists have argued that China may increase the number of nuclear warheads capable of reaching the United States, rather than simply replacing the DF-4 and DF-5 on a one-to-one basis.13 But the essential feature of U.S. and Chinese forces is that, unlike U.S.-Soviet forces during the Cold War, they are decoupled. The two sides do not engage in the kind of day-to-day deterrent operations that characterized the Cold War relationship between the United States and Russia. Chinese missiles remain in their garrisons or silos, with the warheads in storage, and it has conducted only a single patrol of its ballistic missile submarine, with rather disappointing results.
Yet this could change. The ongoing modernization of both Chinese and U.S. strategic forces could create the kind of escalatory dynamics that characterized the most dangerous moments of the Cold War, raising the prospect of a serious crisis between two nuclear-armed nations with vastly different historical, cultural, and strategic outlooks.
The United States and China have experienced several tense crises in recent years, arising from the operation of military forces in close proximity to one another. In 2001, a Chinese fighter jet collided with a U.S. EP-3E reconnaissance aircraft, killing the Chinese pilot and forcing the EP-3E to land on Hainan Island. China detained the crew for eleven days, while the United States and China negotiated the return of the crew and the aircraft. More recently, in March 2009, the United States Navy announced that “five Chinese vessels shadowed and aggressively maneuvered close to the USNS Impeccable in the South China Sea.” Although the Impeccable was described as an “oceanographic ship” that was “conducting routine operations in international waters,” the Chinese viewed the ship as conducting surveillance for antisubmarine warfare activities. Although the Impeccable was operating well within the boundaries of international law, the Chinese actions may have been motivated by a desire to protect sensitive submarine operations in the area. In a third incident, in June 2009, a Chinese submarine accidentally collided with a sonar array being towed by a U.S. destroyer.14
These three incidents illustrate that U.S.-Chinese forces, operating in close proximity to one other during a crisis, face serious strategic stability challenges. Based on press reports of exercises, in a crisis China would disperse mobile ballistic missiles and fuel missiles in fixed sites.15 How would American policy-makers react, especially if its own forces were placed on alert? The history of U.S. alert operations suggests that alert operations have an inherent escalatory potential. In studies of the four U.S. DEFCON-3 or higher alerts, Scott Sagan found that orders were frequently misunderstood or ambiguous events misinterpreted to confirm the sense of crisis and concluded that “keeping the alert at the desired level will be extremely difficult, and the degree of further grave escalation uncertain.”16 The inherent risk is captured by President Kennedy’s sardonic remark, upon learning that a U2 had strayed over Soviet airspace during the Cuban Missile Crisis: “There’s always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get the message.”17
One can imagine the potential for escalation if, for instance, Chinese missile submarines put out to sea during a crisis. U.S. attack submarines would surely attempt to tail them. What would happen if, in a crisis, two submarines collided? Or if the Chinese submarine suffered a crippling accident, like the torpedo explosion that sank the Russian submarine Kursk? Would Chinese policy-makers, in the midst of a tense atmosphere, be able to distinguish the loss of contact with submarines from early efforts to eliminate their deterrent? How would U.S. policy-makers react if China appeared to prepare mobile ballistic missiles that could perform antisatellite missions? Or antiship DF-21D missiles that, externally, are identical to China’s nuclear-armed DF-21 and DF-21As? It is impossible to predict. But the recent history of U.S.-Chinese crisis stability is not encouraging.
Recognizing these issues, recent Democratic and Republican administrations have pressed to expand military-to-military exchanges. The United States and China have begun a formal dialogue on strategic issues in recent years. In 2005, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld visited the headquarters of the Second Artillery. In 2008, Secretary Gates announced that the United States and China had established a hotline linking the Department of Defense and the Chinese Defense Ministry and initiated talks between their two militaries on nuclear issues.
These are important steps, but they are limited in scope. The Second Artillery is an important factor in Chinese strategic policy, but they are first and foremost “operators” who are responsible for handling ballistic missiles. The General Armaments Department—which is responsible for the ballistic missile program and the entire nuclear complex—is probably a more important voice, particularly on the issue of modernization. The United States has had rather less access to the nuclear weapons complex, since the laboratory-to-laboratory exchange program was shuttered in the 1990s.
The United States and China also have a Strategic and Economic Dialogue (SED). Initially conducted between the Treasury Department and the Ministry of Finance, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has pushed to make the dialogue a Strategic and Economic Dialogue, serving as a co-chair with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and changing the acronym from SED to SAED to reflect the dual nature. At the undersecretary level, the United States and China have conducted four rounds of a bilateral U.S.-China security dialogue, with the most recent having occurred in June 2008 between Acting Undersecretary of State John Rood and Vice Minister He Yafei. This dialogue is the principal forum for arms control discussions, although the agenda includes a wide variety of other issues including nonproliferation concerns.
In 1994, the United States and China initiated laboratory-to-laboratory exchanges.18 The exchanges were ended after allegations of Chinese espionage leveled in the Cox Report. In 2005, the United States government sought to revive the laboratory-to-laboratory exchange program. Having felt that previous exchanges were mischaracterized by opponents, the Chinese side insisted that the United States provide a letter that included the written assurance that laboratory-to-laboratory exchanges during the 1990s had been “legal and mutually beneficial.” Although some officials within the Department of Energy pressed to issue China this assurance, others in the Bush administration successfully opposed the measure. The Obama administration has yet to revive cooperation, despite encouraging statements similar to those made in recent years.
In lieu of formal contacts, the U.S.-China relationship is sustained by a multitude of so-called Track II dialogues—the term deriving from “Track I” channel of official government-to-government discourse. There are currently a number of such discussions organized by academic institutions. Bridging political, cultural, and linguistic divides is a difficult task. The ongoing policy dialogue between the United States National Academies of Science Committee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) and the Chinese Scientists Group for Arms Control (CSGAC) is probably the oldest, continuous “Track II” dialogue. The CISAC-CSGAC group completed a joint Nuclear Security Glossary of terms commonly used in their dialogue which illustrates some of the challenges. The document is an impressive achievement, all the more so for the challenges that confronted the authors over a number of phrases. For example, Chinese participants objected to including the term “limited deterrence” out of concern that it might suggest China’s nuclear posture was changing along the lines outlined above. U.S. participants pointed to the literature discussed earlier to suggest that it deserved inclusion. The phrase— (yŏuxiàn wēishè)— was eventually included, with explanations like “there is no consensus on the definition” and “in some descriptions it refers to France’s nuclear deterrent.”19
There is real danger that ongoing modernization in both countries could gradually couple the two countries’ nuclear forces, creating an analogous situation to the dangerous force interactions that characterized U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces during the Cold War. The prospect of entanglement is driven by the differing perceptions in Beijing and Washington. American observers worry that China will increase the size of its nuclear forces to seek parity with the United States, undermining extended deterrence. When China deploys road-mobile missiles, the United States sees this as threatening its ability to come to the aid of allies in the region. When the United States deploys missile defenses, Chinese leaders view this as an effort to negate China’s deterrent. As both sides undertake essentially technology-driven improvements to a defensive capability, they become more deeply entangled. Avoiding this outcome requires that both countries understand their shared interest in maintaining strategic stability, including the viability of China’s deterrent as well as the U.S. extended deterrent in Asia.
The concern that China might seek numerical parity is embedded in the loose idea that the United States should maintain a nuclear force that is “second to none.” In practice, this means that the United States should maintain operationally deployed strategic forces that are at rough parity with Russia and therefore several factors larger than the worst-case estimate for Chinese forces. There is a real fear among American policy-makers that substantial reductions in U.S. operationally deployed strategic forces would tempt China to “sprint” to numerical parity—quickly increasing the number of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, much as it did with conventionally armed short-range ballistic mis siles near Taiwan over the past decade. As the United States and Russia explore further bilateral reductions, the prospect of larger Chinese forces has become a “floor” for deep reductions.
There is little evidence, however, that Chinese officials view numerical parity as an important concept, having lived with a numerically inferior deterrent for decades. Moreover, substantial increases in force size would, as noted above, require a fundamental transformation of the Second Artillery and, presumably, the nuclear navy. These changes are possible, of course, but they would likely occur over a very long time-frame with substantial indications.
Because China maintains ambiguity about what one Chinese observer called “operational information and armament capabilities”—technical information about the size and capability of China’s nuclear forces—China has not taken steps to reassure the United States that it would welcome significant reductions. Indeed, most Chinese observers express disbelief that China would seek parity and note that China’s forces are so small that it makes little difference if the United States reduces from 2,200 to 1,500 warheads. It is difficult for many Chinese to contemplate placing even general constraints on the modernization of the forces, given current disparities in force size.
Within China, there is a real sense that the United States seeks to negate China’s deterrent. Chinese officials are quite worried about the long-term implications of missile defense and conventional strike on their deterrent. Although one frequently hears U.S. commentators indicate that the purpose of China’s nuclear forces is to discourage U.S. involvement in a crisis over Taiwan, Chinese officials and academics continue to describe their deterrent in terms of an existential safeguard to prevent the United States from using the threat of a nuclear attack to coerce China.
This reflects a fundamental difference in conception: many U.S. officials and academics think about the utility of nuclear weapons in terms of use. This is not surprising—popular mythology in the United States is that the use of two nuclear weapons against Japan brought the Second World War to its conclusion. Chinese interlocutors on the other hand tend to emphasize the role of nuclear weapons in coercion. This reflects China’s experience with U.S. nuclear threats during the Korean War. Two Chinese scholars—Li Bin and Nie Hongyi—are particularly direct about this difference in conception and its implications:
General offense-defense theory and classic arms control theory are the same in assuming a nation selects behavior based solely on the magnitude of its interest. This is a bit different than the reality of strategic weaponry. Classic arms con trol theory predicts that when a nuclear country is going to lose a conventional war and does not worry about nuclear relation, the possibility [of] saving the situation with a nuclear attack is great. But the Korean, Vietnam and Afghan wars all demonstrate that this prediction does not reflect actual conditions in international society. The theory of the nuclear taboo in constructivist theory postulates a norm in international society against the use of nuclear weapons, a norm known as the nuclear taboo. Under the conditions of this nuclear taboo, just because a country has the ability to carry out a preemptive nuclear attack does not mean they can carry out this type of nuclear attack at will. However, the existence of the nuclear taboo does not prevent a nuclear weapon state from using the superiority of its nuclear weapons to engage in coercion. Consequently, the most direct result of a strategic imbalance is nuclear coercion.20
The difference is an important one; consider the case of a no-first-use pledge. Many Americans describe such a pledge as a hollow promise, noting that a president retains, irrespective of such pledges, the right of belligerent reprisal. On the other hand, if the primary utility of nuclear weapons is coercion rather than actual use, forswearing first-use does constrain a leader’s “use” of the weapons in a political context.
As a result, Chinese arguments about strategic stability are rooted in overall questions about the political relationship rather than force-exchange ratios. Central to this is the pursuit of a mutual deterrent relationship, enshrined in a bilateral no-first-use pledge. China sought such an assurance in the 1990s, resulting in the so-called nontargeting agreement signed by presidents Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin.
Whereas American officials tend to regard such pledges as meaningless— and call into question the sincerity of the Chinese pledge—Chinese observers believe that the political significance of the gesture is the important thing, and it could result in visible changes to U.S. posture that would be reassuring to Beijing. The precise formulation is perhaps not so important, one senior official told me: “The important thing is that you say it.” The Chinese side, in the bilateral exchange in 2008, renewed their interest in a no-first-use pledge, without success.
The reluctance of the United States to make such a statement demonstrates how far the United States and the rest of the world remain from the goal of the elimination of nuclear weapons. Despite the president’s vision in Prague, the United States continues to rely on nuclear weapons for a number of missions beyond the fundamental purpose of deterring and, if necessary, responding to nuclear attacks. The 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), despite its claim to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, does not represent a sharp break with past U.S. nuclear weapons policies.
In some cases this is not unwelcome. The NPR, for example, embraces strategic stability in the U.S.-China relationship. Yet the implications of this statement are not articulated, in part reflecting ambivalence within the United States. When Acting Undersecretary Rood was unwilling to state that the United States does not seek to negate China’s deterrent, he was accurately reflecting the lack of consensus about China’s deterrent that has continued into the Obama administration. This debate is often characterized by the question of whether China is a “little Russia” or a “big rogue”—with the implication being that Russia is to be deterred, while a rogue (like North Korea) is to be defended against. The text of the NPR compares China to Russia, but does not commit to the implication of that comparison.
The NPR leaves open the possibility of a fundamental transformation in the strategic relationship of the two countries, but the Obama administration appears reluctant to move further. In part, the careful wording of the NPR appears intended to leave open some options, while not taking on a debate that might undermine prospects for Senate ratification of the U.S.-Russia New START treaty. Many in the Bush administration argued strongly that the United States should not accept China’s deterrent. In 2001, Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith claimed that “it is not the case” that the United States and China have a mutual deterrent relationship, adding that “we should not import into our thinking about China the cold war concepts of mutual assured destruction.”21 Similarly, deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, in a draft report to the secretary of state (later leaked to the Washington Times), explained that the United States “should make it clear that it will not accept a mutual vulnerability relationship with China.”22 This view remains a political reality in Washington.
Yet “mutual vulnerability” is a particularly unflattering description of what many regard as a simple fact: that China and the United States each have a significant military capability to threaten the security of the other. Another view in Washington is that this is not a policy choice, but rather a fact. A recent Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, co-chaired by William Perry and Brent Scowcroft, captured this sense by noting “that mutual vulnerability with China—like mutual vulnerability with Russia—is not a policy choice to be embraced or rejected, but rather a strategic fact to be managed with priority on strategic stability.”23
Yet despite the wildly divergent perceptions in Beijing and Washington, each government is preoccupied with essentially the same concern—that the other party does not respect the status quo. An understanding, therefore, needs to state clearly what aspects of the status quo each party values and seeks to preserve. For the United States, it is assurance that China does not seek strategic parity or to undermine U.S. security commitments—above all else to Japan. For China, it is that the United States does not seek to negate China’s deterrent or conduct “nuclear blackmail” like that Beijing believes it endured in the 1950s.
1. Declassified documents from the 1990s place classified estimates of the total stockpile, including a small stockpile of aircraft-delivered gravity bombs, between 200 and 250 warheads. See, for example, China’s Nuclear Weapons Testing: Facing Prospects for a Comprehensive Test Ban, Office of Scientific and Weapons Research, September 30, 1993, p. 1; and “China Seeking Foreign Assistance to Address Concerns about Nuclear Stockpile under CTBT,” Proliferation Digest (March 29, 1996): 38 (released under the Freedom of Information Act).
2. According to unclassified U.S. intelligence assessments, China “has over 100 warheads deployed operationally on ballistic missiles. Additional warheads are in storage.” Proliferation: Threat and Response, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1997. The intelligence community continues to describe the Chinese nuclear stockpile in this manner. See, for example, DIA director Michael Maples’s statement in 2006 that “China currently has more than 100 nuclear warheads.” Lieutenant General Michael D. Maples, U.S. Army Director, Defense Intelligence Agency, “Current and Projected National Security Threats to the United States,” statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, February 28, 2006.
3. On Chinese ballistic missile developments, see Annual Report to Congress: Military Power of the People’s Republic of China 2008, Department of Defense, 2008; and Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat, National Air and Space Intelligence Center, August 2006.
4. Alice Langley Hsieh, “China’s Nuclear-Missile Programme: Regional or Intercontinental?” China Quarterly 45 (January–March 1971): 85–99.
5. “CIA National Intelligence Estimate of Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat through 2015,” hearing before the International Security, Proliferation, and Federal Services Subcommittee of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, 107th Congress, second session, March 11, 2002, S. Hrg. 107–467.
6. Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat, National Air and Space Intelligence Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. March 2006.
7. Kenneth Allen and Maryanne Kivlehan-Wise, “Implementing the Second Artillery’s Doctrinal Reforms,” in China’s Revolution in Doctrinal Affairs, ed. James Mulvenon and David Finkelstein (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analysis, 2005), p. 179.
8. Robert D. Walpole, National Intelligence Officer for Strategic and Nuclear Programs, speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 17, 1998, at http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/1998/walpole_speech_091798.html. Operational Studies implies this arrangement by defining the “missile base group” as “two or more missile bases and warhead bases.” See Operational Studies [Zhanyi xue] (Beijing: National Defense University, 2000), ch. 14, p. 1. For a description of Chinese operating practices, see Strategic Missile Tidbits (1995), p. 3, at http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/file_download/4/DOD_Strategic_Missile_Tidbits.pdf.
9. For an account of China’s centralized system of warhead storage, see Mark Stokes, China’s Nuclear Warhead Storage and Handling System, March 12, 2010, at http://project2049.net/documents/chinas_nuclear_warhead_storage_and_handling_system.pdf.
10. PRTBs are described in Richard Clarke, Your Government Failed You (New York: Ecco, 2008), pp. 102–3. Chinese press reports of mobile ballistic missile exercises are described in Li Bin, “Tracking Chinese Strategic Mobile Missiles,” Science and Global Security 15, no. 1 (2007): 11–30.
11. Operational Studies [Zhanyi xue].
12. See Current and Projected National Security Threats to the United States, Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, S. Hrg. 107–597 (February 6, 2002), p. 321; and Country Profiles: China (Ballistic Missile Defense Organization Countermeasure Integration Program, April 1995), pp. 12–18. China also has the capability to place multiple warheads on its older, liquid-fueled DF-5 ICBMs, although it has not yet done so.
13. For example, Sun Xiangli has disputed the notion that “the number of weapons that make up a limited nuclear force is immutably fixed. In fact, the required size for such a capability is a dynamic quantity relating to the nuclear arsenal’s survivability. For instance, one guide to the size required of China’s nuclear force is to be able to mount a nuclear strike that can penetrate an enemy’s missile defense system after surviving a first strike.” Sun Xiangli, “Analysis of China’s Nuclear Strategy,” China Security no. 1 (Autumn 2005): 23–27.
14. “U.S.-China Naval Incidents-Updated June 12, 2009,” War and Conflict Journal, weblog, at http://warandconflictjournal.com/2009/06/u-s-china-naval-incidents-updated-june-12-2009/.
15. For example, one exercise is described in Dong Jushan and Wu Xudong, “Build New China’s Shield of Peace,” Beijing Zhongguo Qingnian Bao (July 1, 2001), FBIS-CPP-2001-0703-000119.
16. Scott D. Sagan, “Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management,” International Security 9, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 136.
17. Scott D. Sagan, Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 117–18.
18. For a history of the program, see Nancy Prindle, “Report: The U.S.-China Labto-Lab Technical Exchange Program,” Nonproliferation Review 5, no. 3 (Spring–Summer 1998): 111–18.
19. English-Chinese, Chinese-English Nuclear Security Glossary (Washington, DC: National Academies Press; and Beijing: Atomic Energy Press, 2008), p. 33. Chinese participants also objected to the inclusion of the phrase “assassin’s mace” or 
(shāshŏujiăn), which some U.S. analysts assert is a key strategic concept. The Chinese participants, in interviews with the author, strongly objected to such a characterization, treating the term as a colloquial metaphor, much as English speakers use “silver bullet” or “trump card.” The resulting definition states that an “assassin’s mace” is a “type of metal weapon” before noting its use in a metaphorical context.
20. Li Bin and Nie Hongyi, “An Investigation of China-U.S. Strategic Stability,” World Economics & Politics 2 (2008): 13–19, translated by Gregory Kulacki (
2 (2008): 13–19. English translation available at http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nwgs/Li-and-Nie-translation-final-5-22- 09.pdf.
21. Administration’s Missile Defense Program and the ABM Treaty, hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, S. Hrg. 107–10 (July 24, 2001), p. 32.
22. Secretary of State International Security Advisory Board (ISAB) Task Force on China’s Strategic Modernization, China’s Strategic Modernization, undated draft (c. 2008).
23. William J. Perry and Brent Scowcroft, Chairs, Charles D. Ferguson, Project Director, U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy, Independent Task Force Report No. 62 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2009), p. 45.