China is set to quadruple its stockpile of nuclear warheads to a thousand by 2030 as it attempts to rival or surpass US power by the middle of the century, the Pentagon warned yesterday.
Beijing’s nuclear weapon expansion is accelerating at a rate not foreseen even a year ago, in a dramatic change in the global arms race, the US military concluded in a report.
America has 5,550 nuclear warheads and no plans to increase them, having cut the number from about 10,000 in the past two decades. President Biden’s administration is reviewing nuclear policy and has not said how that might be influenced by its concerns about China.
The Pentagon’s report did not say how many weapons China already had but a year ago it said that the number was in the “low 200s” and was likely to double by the end of this decade. Independent estimates put China’s stockpile at about 350.
The US believes that Beijing’s growing armoury suggests that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is intent on challenging for dominance in all domains of warfare: air, land, sea, space and cyberspace. “The PLA’s evolving capabilities and concepts continue to strengthen [China’s] ability to ‘fight and win wars’ against a ‘strong enemy’ — a likely euphemism for the United States,” the Pentagon report said.
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It added that the expansion made China more capable of putting pressure on Taiwan, the self-ruled island that China claims as its territory and has vowed to take back.
China’s military modernisation is proceeding on a wide front, but its nuclear advances are especially notable.
It may already have established what is known as a nuclear triad: the combination of land, sea, and air-based missiles that the US and Russia have had for decades, the report said. China is adding an air-launched ballistic missile to its land and sea-based nuclear forces.
The Pentagon report was based on information collected up to the end of last year and does not mention the concern raised last month by Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, about Chinese hypersonic weapon tests last summer.
The report referred only to the widely known fact that China had tested the DF-17 medium-range ballistic missile, equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle designed to evade US missile defences.
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Milley told the Aspen Security Forum yesterday that the hypersonic missile test and other Chinese advances were evidence of what was at stake for the global balance of power. “We are witnessing one of the largest shifts in global and geostrategic power that the world has witnessed,” he said.
The Pentagon said that China was pursuing a network of overseas bases that “could interfere with” US military operations and could support military operations against the US. President Xi has said that China plans to become a global military power by 2049.
The Pentagon’s assessment of China’s military strategy and force development is the latest in an annual series of reports to Congress. It also questioned China’s compliance with international biological and chemical weapons agreements, citing studies at military medical institutions that discussed identifying, testing and characterising groups of “potent toxins” that have civilian as well as military uses.
