Will the US’ new nuclear policies spark an arms race with China?

Last month, the Trump administration unveiled its nuclear policy review. As expected, the document significantly departed from Donald Trump’s predecessors. Every American president since Richard Nixon has cut the role and number of nuclear weapons in US strategy, but Trump called for new low-yield nuclear weapons and expanded the circumstances in which they can be used.

This is a dangerous development. In regions where superpower tensions already run high, the United States has significantly raised the stakes of miscalculation or misunderstanding.

Nuclear deterrence is an all or nothing game boiling down to ability to inflict unacceptable losses on an adversary. It does not take many nuclear weapons to accomplish this, nor is there any credible reason to believe that low-yield nuclear weapons will make the unthinkable less likely. A retired senior army officer who examined the review said the authors have provided Trump with “a kind of gateway drug for nuclear war”.

China has shown clear understanding since it entered the nuclear weapons club in 1964. Mao Zedong understood that nuclear weapons could never be used. He is often quoted as referring to nuclear weapons as “paper tigers”, terrifying illusions with no power. To this day, China’s nuclear weapons policy largely reflects Mao’s philosophy.

In the 54 years since China tested its first nuclear bomb, it has accumulated roughly 270 nuclear warheads. The US arsenal, by contrast, ballooned to more than 32,000 in the late 1960s, with the US developing a nuclear bazooka, air-to-air missiles, surface-to-air missiles and a cannon to fire shells with the force of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Many of these weapons have been tossed in the dustbin, but the US retains an inventory of more than 6,000 warheads.

None of China’s nuclear weapons are low-yield and, unlike the US, China adheres to a no-first-use policy – China’s arsenal can only be used for retaliation. By forgoing low-yield nuclear weapons and relying on high-yield nuclear weapons, China strengthens its paper tigers, making them appear more ferocious and reducing the odds that it will have to use them.

China also stores its warheads separately from delivery vehicles. This eliminates the risk of mistakenly firing the weapons in response to be a false alarm. Russia and the US keep their missiles on hair-trigger alert, and on more than one occasion both countries nearly used them.

Over the years, China has upgraded its nuclear arsenal, replacing many outdated missiles, and it now operates a fleet of four Jin-class ballistic missile submarines able to carry 48 submarine-launched ballistic missiles. However, its nuclear submarines do not conduct regular deterrence patrols or store warheads on board. Although the amount of weapons in its nuclear arsenal has gradually increased, most upgrades have been qualitative, not quantitative.