The October 2023 bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Commission’s report contained two important insights concerning the implications of China’s nuclear weapons buildup: 1) the United States will soon be threatened not by “one, but two nuclear peer adversaries, each with ambitions to change the international status quo, by force,” and 2) that China will achieve “…rough quantitative parity with the United States in deployed nuclear warheads by
the mid-2030s.” Unfortunately, the situation is likely even worse. On August 12, 2021, the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command Admiral Charles Richard summed it up: “We are witnessing a strategic breakout by China….The explosive growth in their nuclear and conventional forces can only be what I
described as
breathtaking.”
The Commission’s assessment of the 2027-2035 Chinese nuclear threat, while better than any published Pentagon assessment in decades, is still based upon flawed executive branch analysis. The Pentagon’s assessment of the Chinese nuclear buildup is very ominous, but it is probably substantially too low. There has been a slow recognition of this growing nuclear threat in the Pentagon reports. The October 2023 Pentagon report on Chinese military power, published after the Commission report (the Commission data cutoff was in May 2023), voiced increased concern about the unprecedented Chinese nuclear buildup. It revealed that China was accelerating its extensive
nuclear modernization and that the Chinese nuclear weapons expansion was “on track to exceed previous projections,” which included in the 2022 Pentagon China report’s an estimate of
1,500 weapons in 2035. The Chinese nuclear warhead numbers released in the 2023 report indicated that China had “more than 500 operational nuclear warheads as of May 2023,” and that it would have “over 1,000 operational nuclear
warheads by 2030.” Counting “operational” nuclear weapons appears to have been selected in order to make the Chinese nuclear force look lower compared to that of the United States. The U.S. nuclear weapons numbers announced by the Biden Administration in 2021 included “active” (operational), inactive, and weapons awaiting
dismantlement. It did not state how many “active” nuclear warheads the United States has.
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