After decades of maintaining a minimal nuclear force, China has re-engineered many of its long-range ballistic missiles to carry multiple warheads, a step that US officials and policy analysts say appears designed to give pause to the US as it prepares to deploy more robust missile defenses in the Pacific.
What makes China’s decision particularly notable is that the technology to miniaturize warheads and put three or more atop a single missile has been in Chinese hands for decades. However, a succession of Chinese leaders deliberately let it sit unused; they were not interested in getting into the kind of arms race that characterized the Cold War nuclear competition between the US and the Soviet Union.
However, now Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) appears to have altered course at the same moment that China is building military airfields on disputed islands in the South China Sea, declaring an exclusive Chinese “air defense identification zone,” sending Chinese submarines through the Persian Gulf for the first time and creating a powerful new arsenal of cyberweapons.
Many of those steps have taken US officials by surprise and have become evidence of the challenge the administration of US President Barack Obama faces in dealing with China, in particular after US intelligence agencies had predicted that Xi would focus on economic development and follow the path of his predecessor, who advocated the country’s “peaceful rise.”
US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Beijing on Saturday to discuss a variety of security and economic issues of concern to the US, although it remained unclear whether this development with the missiles, which officials describe as recent, was on his agenda.
US officials say that, so far, China has declined to engage in talks on the decision to begin deploying multiple nuclear warheads atop its ballistic missiles.
Beijing’s new nuclear program was reported deep inside the annual Pentagon report about Chinese military capabilities, disclosing a development that poses a dilemma for the Obama administration, which has never talked publicly about these Chinese nuclear advances.
Obama is under more pressure than ever to deploy missile defense systems in the Pacific, although US policy officially states that those interceptors are to counter North Korea, not China. At the same time, the president is trying to find a way to signal that he would resist Chinese efforts to intimidate its neighbors, including some of Washington’s closest allies, and to keep the US out of the Western Pacific.
There is already talk in the Pentagon of speeding up the missile defense effort and of sending military ships into international waters near the disputed islands to make it clear that the US insists on free navigation, even in areas that China is claiming as its exclusive zone.
To US officials, the Chinese move fits into a rapid transformation of their strategy under Xi, now considered one of the most powerful Chinese leaders since Mao Zedong (毛澤東) or Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平).
Vivid photographs, which were released recently, of Chinese efforts to reclaim land on disputed islands in the South China Sea and immediately build airfields on them, underscored for White House policymakers and military planners the speed and intensity of Xi’s determination to push potential competitors out into the mid-Pacific.
“This is obviously part of an effort to prepare for long-term competition with the United States,” said Ashley Tellis, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was a senior national security official in the administration of former US president George W. Bush. “The Chinese are always fearful of American nuclear advantage.”
US nuclear forces today outnumber China’s eight-to-one. The choice of which nuclear missiles to upgrade was notable, Tellis said, because China chose “one of few that can unambiguously reach the United States.”
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