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| Chinese Road-Mobile ICBM (TEL) Transporter/Erector/Launcher |
By Nicolas Giacometti
For half a century, China’s nuclear strategy has been surprisingly consistent. Will it remain so?
Fifty years ago, at 7:00 GMT on October 16, 1964, China exploded its first nuclear device at the Lop Nur test site, becoming the fifth official member of the nuclear club after the U.S., the Soviet Union, the U.K. and France. This anniversary is an occasion to take stock of fifty years of Chinese nuclear strategy and reflect on its potential evolution in light of the ongoing modernization of the country’s nuclear arsenal. Overall, the analyst is faced with the problem of peering through the fog of Beijing’s nuclear secrecy to assess the credibility of Beijing’s seemingly unaltered nuclear strategy.
Since 1964, China’s declaratory policy has remained surprisingly consistent. Beijing regularly restates that the purely defensive role of its nuclear weapons limits their role to preventing any form of nuclear blackmailing or nuclear strike against China. As such, Beijing claims that it would only use its nuclear weapons in a second strike after having suffered a nuclear attack. This unilateral No-First-Use (NFU) policy is complemented by unconditional Negative Security Assurances (NSA) that commit China to not using or threatening to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states or non-nuclear weapons zones.
China also regularly insists on the fact that the limited size and capabilities of its nuclear arsenal confirm this policy and that it exercises utmost restraint on nuclear weapons development. It thus describes the size of its arsenal as being kept at the lowest level necessary for self-defense only, with very low levels of readiness. This is confirmed by the limited capabilities of China’s nuclear arsenal, especially during the Cold War years. Kristensen and Norris estimate that China only possessed around 200 nuclear warheads in 1990, when the U.K. had around 350, France 550, and the superpowers more than 20,000. Of these 200 warheads, only a handful could reach part of the continental United States when fitted on the liquid-fuelled DF-5 silo-based ICBM. The other warheads could only be assigned to regional deterrence because of the limited range of the missiles and aircraft to which they were assigned.
Read the full story at The Diplomat