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For growing arsenal, the target is East but the race is with India
Last week, China released its latest white paper on military strategy, outlining a new policy of “active defence”.
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The white paper, being released by Chinese defence spokesperson Senior Colonel Yang Yujun on May 26 . Reuters
Written by Praveen Swami | New Delhi | Published on:June 1, 2015 1:33 am
The bomb that changed Asia was called 596 — a simple Uranium-235 implosion device, with a yield equivalent to 22,000 tonnes of TNT, that exploded on the dried-out plains of Lop Nur in the autumn of 1964. Named for the year, 1959, and month, June, that an increasingly hostile Moscow had cut off nuclear aid to China, 596 was meant to deter the Soviet Union. But it sparked a nuclear race that is still unfolding across Asia.
Last week, China released its latest white paper on military strategy, outlining a new policy of “active defence”. The paper comes in the midst of evidence China is growing its long-stable nuclear arsenal — and, more important, adding new capabilities to it.
Related
Is this the beginning of a new nuclear-arms race in Asia? And should India respond by scaling up its own arsenal?
For years now, China is known to have been working on equipping its arsenal with independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs — multiple warheads carried on each nuclear-armed missile, increasing its lethality manifold.
Key developments, experts say, include the development of the road-mobile DF-31A inter-continental ballistic missile, with a range over 11,200 km, and the DF-41, equipped with MIRVs.
Experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimate the number of Chinese warheads has increased from 235 to 250. India has responded by scaling up its own arsenal from around 50, to over 110.
This sits ill, at first glance, with the Chinese understanding of the strategic environment spelt out in the white paper: “In the forseeable future, a world war is unlikely, and the international situation is expected to remain generally peaceful.”
Part of the answer to this puzzle lies in the evolving missile defence capacities of the United States, its European allies, and Japan. The Western alliance’s Ballistic Missile Defence system consists of three elements: Aegis, which uses ship-based radar and the SM-3 interceptor missile to protect forces in the field; Ground-based Midcourse Defence, which uses satellite data to destroy incoming missiles mid-flight; and the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defence system, which hits incoming ballistic missiles shortly before they hit their targets.
Experts are divided on just how effective BMD is. George Lewis, a physicist at Cornell University, and Theodore Postol, a former adviser to the US Navy who now works at MIT, have argued the technology is less robust than marketed. In addition, BMD can be defeated by decoys, or tricks like sawing fins off missiles to give them an erratic trajectory.
But even if BMD succeeds in eliminating a significant part of China’s deterrent capacity, it is a game-changer. For example, if the United States should decide to launch a first-strike on China’s arsenal, it would be with the knowledge that its BMD capacities would render much of the retaliatory
second-strike incapable.
This advantage is now under threat. MIRVs — deployed in Western and Soviet arsenals since the 1960s — ensure that even the limited number of missiles that survive an enemy first strike can inflict lethal retaliation. In addition, each missile that penetrates the BMD shield can do that much more damage. But they also give an attacker an advantage — allowing them to target enemy arsenals more effectively in a first strike.
Like India, China appears to believe that only limited guaranteed destructive potential is adequate to deter attack: no attacker, the reasoning goes, would risk a first strike knowing that it might cost them their key cities. In a 2009 paper, Major-General Pan Zhenqiang candidly stated that China’s “sole nuclear mission is to retaliate against cities, known as a ‘counter-value mission’”-as opposed to ‘counter-force’, or a strike on the enemy’s nuclear arsenal.
Thus, the scholar Chong-Pin Lin has argued, China’s nuclear weapons are “ultimately counterstrategy, targeting the nuclear weapons at the mind of the enemy’s strategy-maker”.
But for India and other Asian states, China’s nuclear arsenal modernisation comes with many risks. Though China’s new MIRVs may be targeted East rather than West, they equally pose a counter-value threat to India’s arsenal. This could compel India to grow its arsenal, expanding the numbers of missiles deployed on platforms that are certain to survive a first strike, like nuclear submarines which can lurk undetected indefinitely.
Growing unease over the United States’ willingness to back up its security guarantees to countries like Japan and Korea, moreover, could lead them, in the future, to consider acquiring an independent nuclear deterrent — much as France and the United Kingdom did.
Last week, China released its latest white paper on military strategy, outlining a new policy of “active defence”.
00Google +0
Written by Praveen Swami | New Delhi | Published on:June 1, 2015 1:33 am
The bomb that changed Asia was called 596 — a simple Uranium-235 implosion device, with a yield equivalent to 22,000 tonnes of TNT, that exploded on the dried-out plains of Lop Nur in the autumn of 1964. Named for the year, 1959, and month, June, that an increasingly hostile Moscow had cut off nuclear aid to China, 596 was meant to deter the Soviet Union. But it sparked a nuclear race that is still unfolding across Asia.
Last week, China released its latest white paper on military strategy, outlining a new policy of “active defence”. The paper comes in the midst of evidence China is growing its long-stable nuclear arsenal — and, more important, adding new capabilities to it.
Related
Is this the beginning of a new nuclear-arms race in Asia? And should India respond by scaling up its own arsenal?
For years now, China is known to have been working on equipping its arsenal with independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs — multiple warheads carried on each nuclear-armed missile, increasing its lethality manifold.
Key developments, experts say, include the development of the road-mobile DF-31A inter-continental ballistic missile, with a range over 11,200 km, and the DF-41, equipped with MIRVs.
Experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimate the number of Chinese warheads has increased from 235 to 250. India has responded by scaling up its own arsenal from around 50, to over 110.
This sits ill, at first glance, with the Chinese understanding of the strategic environment spelt out in the white paper: “In the forseeable future, a world war is unlikely, and the international situation is expected to remain generally peaceful.”
Part of the answer to this puzzle lies in the evolving missile defence capacities of the United States, its European allies, and Japan. The Western alliance’s Ballistic Missile Defence system consists of three elements: Aegis, which uses ship-based radar and the SM-3 interceptor missile to protect forces in the field; Ground-based Midcourse Defence, which uses satellite data to destroy incoming missiles mid-flight; and the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defence system, which hits incoming ballistic missiles shortly before they hit their targets.
Experts are divided on just how effective BMD is. George Lewis, a physicist at Cornell University, and Theodore Postol, a former adviser to the US Navy who now works at MIT, have argued the technology is less robust than marketed. In addition, BMD can be defeated by decoys, or tricks like sawing fins off missiles to give them an erratic trajectory.
But even if BMD succeeds in eliminating a significant part of China’s deterrent capacity, it is a game-changer. For example, if the United States should decide to launch a first-strike on China’s arsenal, it would be with the knowledge that its BMD capacities would render much of the retaliatory
second-strike incapable.
This advantage is now under threat. MIRVs — deployed in Western and Soviet arsenals since the 1960s — ensure that even the limited number of missiles that survive an enemy first strike can inflict lethal retaliation. In addition, each missile that penetrates the BMD shield can do that much more damage. But they also give an attacker an advantage — allowing them to target enemy arsenals more effectively in a first strike.
Like India, China appears to believe that only limited guaranteed destructive potential is adequate to deter attack: no attacker, the reasoning goes, would risk a first strike knowing that it might cost them their key cities. In a 2009 paper, Major-General Pan Zhenqiang candidly stated that China’s “sole nuclear mission is to retaliate against cities, known as a ‘counter-value mission’”-as opposed to ‘counter-force’, or a strike on the enemy’s nuclear arsenal.
Thus, the scholar Chong-Pin Lin has argued, China’s nuclear weapons are “ultimately counterstrategy, targeting the nuclear weapons at the mind of the enemy’s strategy-maker”.
But for India and other Asian states, China’s nuclear arsenal modernisation comes with many risks. Though China’s new MIRVs may be targeted East rather than West, they equally pose a counter-value threat to India’s arsenal. This could compel India to grow its arsenal, expanding the numbers of missiles deployed on platforms that are certain to survive a first strike, like nuclear submarines which can lurk undetected indefinitely.
Growing unease over the United States’ willingness to back up its security guarantees to countries like Japan and Korea, moreover, could lead them, in the future, to consider acquiring an independent nuclear deterrent — much as France and the United Kingdom did.
