Since 2020, the Pentagon China reports have registered an annual increase of about 100 nuclear warheads. The projected increase over the next 12 years is just over 80 warheads per year. This is a small fraction of what would be expected as a result of the visible increase in Chinese silo and mobile ICBMs, Chinese introduction of MIRVed ICBMs and SLBMs, the large and growing force of Chinese nuclear-capable theater-range missiles, the Chinese deployment of hypersonic missiles and the development and deployment of new bombers. No other nuclear-armed nation has deployed nuclear-only strategic missile launchers much faster than they deployed the missiles and the warheads to arms them. Worse yet, the visible increase in Chinese nuclear capabilities may not be their whole program because China is very good about hiding its capabilities.

The basis of the relatively low projected increase rate is not explained in the Pentagon reports. Assuming it is not based on ideology or political correctness, it could be based on either assumed low levels of fissile material and/or limited warhead production capability. Even if the United States has accurate information on the facilities in which China produces nuclear weapons, production capability depends upon the number of shifts a day that the facilities are worked. By Western standards, manpower is cheap in China. Moreover, with thousands of Chinese underground facilities (which the Pentagon now reports), there could easily be Chinese production facilities the United States does not know about.

The 2023 Pentagon report outlines Chinese efforts to increase plutonium production. These include fast breeder reactors. Open source information indicates that China has more than enough fissile material to arm fully the new nuclear capable delivery systems that it is now deploying. A 2021 assessment published by the University of Nebraska indicates that China had produced enough plutonium for 1,300 nuclear warheads, assuming the capability of known Chinese production facilities. The low estimates of Chinese fissile material don’t even assume that China will use plutonium from civilian nuclear power reactors for nuclear weapons, presumably because the U.S. would not do so because of America’s attitudes concerning nuclear proliferation. James R. Howe estimates that China has enough fissile material for 3,878 nuclear warheads. He estimates that China can produce 12,931-kg of highly enriched uranium per year and when the new reprocessing plants come on-line, China could add 3,000 plutonium-based nuclear weapons. His “very conservative” estimate made in 2019 was that China would have  1,643-2,022 nuclear warheads by 2025, and 3,390-3,740 warheads by 2035, with maximum yields between 20 and 200-kt. Colonel General (ret.) Viktor Yesin has written that China could have “10,000 nuclear munitions, ” basing this on China’s estimated production of “up to 40 tons of weapons uranium” and “about 10 tons of weapons-grade plutonium” manufactured “as of 2011.” Howe’s analysis is probably the best that exists in open sources.

The large payloads of Chinese dual-capable theater-range missiles clearly have the potential to carry low-yield warheads using small amounts of fissile material. Even North Korea has reportedly done this. With precision or near precision accuracy, many nuclear targets do not require 20-200-kiloton warheads to destroy.

Why does the Pentagon substantially underestimate Chinese nuclear weapons numbers and capabilities? Part of it is probably relates to Chinese concealment and disinformation. While the existence of these Chinese efforts is often acknowledged, its relationship to the failed Pentagon assessments is just as often ignored. Historically, China did not want the United States to recognize the full scope of its nuclear buildup because the U.S. might do something about it. In 1982, in a moment of candor, Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded Mao, said China should “…hide our capabilities and bide our time.”

The existence of Chinese disinformation is recognized in the Pentagon reports, but seems to be largely ignored in its bottom line nuclear weapons assessments. In 2011, then-Principal Undersecretary of Defense For Policy James Miller stated that, “China is increasing the size of its nuclear arsenal, but is estimated to have only a few hundred nuclear weapons.” After repeating every year that China was increasing the number of its nuclear weapons, the 2020 Pentagon China report said the Chinese nuclear stockpile is “currently estimated to be in the low-200s…” The implication of this is that the number of Chinese nuclear weapons had seemingly declined since 2011, which is nonsense. Indeed, the 2020 Pentagon estimate was so low that the Editor in Chief of China’s English language mouthpiece Global Times took issue with it, stating that its “estimation of ‘low 200s’ underestimates the number of nuclear warheads in China,” adding “…that international estimation put the number of China's nuclear warheads at over 200 in the 1980s.”

Part of systemic underestimates probably relates to ideology and careerism within the threat assessment community. Promotion often comes from telling their leadership what .it wants to hear while retrospectively looking at track records is uncommon. What their leadership wants to hear often reflects the slowly dying inside-the-beltway fantasy that there is going to be a peaceful rise of China. A classic example of this is a November 2023 Foreign Affairs article which took Chinese propaganda justifications for its large nuclear weapons buildup at face value without assessing the accuracy or even the plausibility of the Chinese claims. It even tried to blame the Chinese nuclear buildup on the Trump Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review despite the fact that the programmatic and doctrinal changes that underlie the unprecedent Chinese nuclear buildup go back decades. Indeed, a 2003 Rand study concluded that, “…the Chinese nuclear threat to the United States could evolve into a smaller version of the former Soviet Union.”

As noted China expert Richard Fisher has pointed out, “China requires nuclear missile superiority because it wants to destroy democracy in Taiwan, wants to destroy the U.S.-led military alliance system in Asia, and wants to be the military hegemon on Earth by mid-century.” James R. Howe writes, “One obvious reason is that China is indeed ‘breaking out’—they intend to be a peer nuclear competitor in order to coerce the US to stand-down in the face of Chinese aggression.” He notes that Chinese policy is aimed at “…establishing itself as the preponderant power in Eurasia and a global power second to none.” A November 2023 Atlantic Council report by Greg Weaver states, “This role for Chinese nuclear forces essentially mirrors an element of Russian strategy and doctrine: initiate limited nuclear use to avoid defeat by coercing the adversary to terminate the conflict on one’s own terms, or at least on terms that one can accept. China’s growing arsenal of militarily effective theater nuclear capabilities backed by a highly survivable strategic nuclear deterrent enables this role. There is one potential circumstance in which this would most likely be considered by China’s leadership: if it faces the impending defeat of the PRC’s conventional invasion, and Chinese leadership assess that a protracted conflict is decidedly not in its interest.” Unfortunately, the situation is worse than this.

One of the most important insights in the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission’s report is that:

The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) is a critical component of China’s deterrence strategy and its efforts to counter third-party intervention in a regional conflict, including conflicts started by China. China cites its “no first use” (NFU) policy in claiming it will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear weapon state or in nuclear-weapon-free zones. However, China’s NFU policy likely includes contemplation of a nuclear strike in response to a non-nuclear attack threatening the viability of China’s nuclear forces or command and control, or that approximates the strategic effects of a nuclear strike. Beijing probably would also consider nuclear use if a conventional military defeat gravely threatened the PRC’s survival….

The PLA has begun implementing a launch-on-warning (LOW) posture called “early warning counterstrike,” where warning of a missile strike leads to a counterstrike before an enemy’s first strike can detonate. The PRC probably seeks to keep at least a portion of its force, especially its new silo-based units, on a LOW posture. The PLARF has conducted exercises since 2017 involving early warning of a nuclear strike and LOW responses.

 

The sources cited in the Commission’s report are actually the Pentagon’s 2022 China report. This recognition is long overdue. Strong evidence that Chinese “no first use” was propaganda has existed for over two decades. The Chinese “no first use” formulation is a cleverly worded deception which has not changed since 1964. As Colonel (ret.) Larry Wortzel pointed out that since, “The U.S. has already used nuclear weapons against Japan in August 1945…[thus] if China launched a surprise nuclear attack tomorrow, it would still not be the first nation to use nuclear weapons.” It sounds like “no first use” but it is not. When it was originally promulgated China was massively inferior in the technology of nuclear weapons, in their numbers and suffered from a comparable or even greater inferiority in delivery vehicles. The original intent was apparently to prevent the pre-emptive elimination of Chinese nuclear capability by the Soviet Union. According to Chinese Lieutenant General Zhao Xijun, then-Second Artillery Deputy Commander, in August 1969, “The Soviet Union was planning to use small nuclear bombs to destroy China’s nuclear missile bases,” to which Mao responded by conducting a “‘nuclear test’ [which] made Soviet authorities weigh the pros and cons and consider the situation very carefully.” The balance of nuclear power that resulted in the 1964 Chinese no first use propaganda has drastically changed creating new opportunities for China to employ offensive nuclear threats.