Tag Archive for: nuclear strategy

China’s secretive build-up presents Trump with a difficult nuclear challenge

After disappearing from debate over the last couple of decades, nuclear politics are set to return with a vengeance. China has begun an unexpected and secretive nuclear force buildup. This presents a major challenge for Donald Trump’s new administration, which will want to maintain US nuclear advantage over China.

China’s shifting nuclear posture, the secrecy surrounding it, and the low likelihood of Chinese cooperation on arms control threaten stability in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

We have heard little from China’s official sources about its plans for nuclear expansion. The likelihood is that China is seeking parity with the US, driven by political drive for status or possibly by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ego. If so, it would be just one of many instances of China pushing for parity in foreign and security policy. It may also be part of a general preparation for any future conflict, which should alarm not just Trump but also other leaders in the Indo-Pacific.

No other reasons make much sense. There is little deterrence logic to China’s nuclear expansion. While some scholars have suggested that China is responding to the US’s offensive and defensive capabilities, this is not particularly convincing, given that the US has not expanded its nuclear arsenal in decades. China’s expansion is more likely the result of China’s ambitions.

Other reasons for the expansion, such as empire-building pressure from within the military establishment, are also unconvincing. Strategic forces are under tight political control in China: decisions definitely flow from the top down. Anyway, such an explanation also fails to explain why a change is happening now. There is little indication that military is more influential (the evidence suggests the opposite) or that its views on nuclear force sizing have changed.

Whatever the reason, China’s nuclear expansion itself is considerable and its end state is unclear.

If this expansion is driven by the pursuit of parity, the Trump administration will face an uphill battle on nuclear arms control with China. Beijing has faced repeated calls for it to join nuclear arms control agreements, all of which it rejected on the basis that its nuclear forces are much more modest than those of other nuclear states. If China is pursuing parity, it is unlikely to be interested in nuclear arms control for a while.

Territorial tensions in the Indo-Pacific and the question of Taiwan are already raising temperatures. Adding nuclear competition to the mix only raises them further.

Until now, China’s no-first-use policy and the nuclear imbalance between the US and China have been some source of comfort. But there have been indications that China may adopt a launch-on-warning posture, meaning it might fire before suffering confirmed nuclear hits. This departure, combined with the pursuit of parity, will make crises much more dangerous.

China’s secrecy should be viewed as a threat to all nations. US-Russia nuclear arms control agreements have meant that the US could justifiably concentrate on the threat posed by Iranian and North Korean proliferation. Meanwhile, China—already the second biggest military in the world—has covertly gone down the path of nuclear proliferation.

While some refer to Trump’s powers of distraction, Beijing has become a master magician: it has sold a lie to the Indo-Pacific that Australia and its AUKUS partners are nuclear proliferators. As a result, Australia has had to defend nuclear propulsion while China rapidly and secretly expands its nuclear weaponry.

China claims to want only equality but is actually seeking superiority across the military and technology sectors, including in the nuclear sector. Reaching arms control is likely to be more difficult in the context of a dissatisfied and difficult-to-satisfy power.

Even if Beijing engages in arms control arrangements, its nuclear history should make us question its commitment. While the US and Russia cooperated on non-proliferation, China has supported nuclear proliferation in Pakistan, North Korea and possibly even Iran. This is at least partly responsible for the growing interest in nuclear weapons in South Korea and Japan.

Beijing’s wider strategic behaviour is also indirectly encouraging nuclear proliferation among its neighbours, by trying to expel the US from the region and raising their fears that they will be left alone in facing China. In those frightening circumstances, going nuclear may seem more desirable to them, if not urgently necessary.

The growing Chinese nuclear threat should be an important consideration for the Trump administration, as well as for Australia and the Indo-Pacific. Regional allies, such as Australia and Japan, should make China’s nuclear threat a key agenda item with the US, starting with the Quad meeting reportedly happening next week.

Australia and nuclear strategy: the empty middle ground?

Some years ago, Christine Leah and I published an article that explored Australian thinking about nuclear weapons and strategy. We argued that for more than six decades Australians had essentially espoused ‘three visions of the bomb’.

Those visions—which we labelled Menzian, Gortonian and disarmer—competed on four grounds: the role that nuclear weapons play in international order; the doctrine of deterrence; the importance of arms control; and the relevance of nuclear weapons to Australia’s specific needs.

It’s important to have a sense of each of the visions. Menzians believed that nuclear weapons made a positive contribution to global order provided that they were held by responsible, self-deterred great powers. Deterrence played a central role in that contribution because the primary role of nuclear weapons was to deter great-power war, not to fight it.

Extended deterrence allowed great powers’ allies to benefit from the security offered by nuclear weapons without needing to build their own. Arms control agreements were important in stabilising international competition and minimising the risk of nuclear proliferation.

And Australian security was maximised by constraining nuclear weapons to their broader, indirect, systemic role; it would be damaged by the wider spread of such weapons.

Gortonians believed that nuclear weapons, over time, would proliferate beyond the small group of great powers. But they also believed that great powers were, like other states, self-centred, and that nuclear weapons would only ever be used to defend key interests. Since interests usually attenuated with distance, it would always be difficult for a great power to extend deterrence to its distant allies; deterrence was, by its nature, a ‘local’ phenomenon.

Arms control wasn’t central to the Gortonian world view: this was the group that opposed Australian signature of the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, fearing it would tie our hands in relation to future options. And, of course, the Gortonians believed that an indigenous nuclear arsenal was necessary to safeguard properly Australia’s key strategic interests—including defence of the continent itself.

Disarmers saw nuclear weapons as order-destroyers rather than order-builders. They denied that great powers were responsible custodians of nuclear arsenals and believed that such states were even more self-interested than smaller states. They declared nuclear deterrence—and extended nuclear deterrence—a myth, and pointed to both the continuation of conventional war and the potentially high cost of system failures as reasons to seek a better path to security.

The disarmers were arms controllers on steroids: they sought grand outcomes, and pursued an absolutist version of nuclear disarmament. And, of course, they saw no value in nuclear weapons for Australian security—whether of the indirect contribution championed by the Menzians or the direct contribution sought by the Gortonians. They wanted Australia to disengage from the nuclear world—spurning the notion of extended nuclear deterrence, closing the joint facilities and forgoing sales of its own uranium.

The three visions advertised radically different futures. The Menzians had a plan for Australia to live in a world where nuclear weapons were held by a small number of great powers. The Gortonians had a plan for Australia to live in a more highly proliferated world. The disarmers had a plan for Australia to live in a world without nuclear weapons.

Each of the visions boasted a long lineage, but it would be wrong to imagine that they were equally influential in shaping Australian nuclear policy. In brief, the Menzians were the dominant vision in every decade; the Gortonians were the nuclear mavericks of the right, the disarmers the nuclear mavericks of the left. Across both major political parties, Labor and the Coalition, a bipartisan commitment to the Menzian vision prevailed.

And so we come to 2018.

An age of nuclear revival is upon us. The great powers are modernising their nuclear arsenals. North Korea has shown that it can design and test not merely simple fission devices, but thermonuclear ones. Our major ally, the United States, has published a Nuclear Posture Review that’s distinctly more muscular than the one it published in 2010—despite the key elements of continuity that the latest document contains.

A small debate has begun to unfold about whether Australia should be reconsidering its own indigenous nuclear arsenal—a debate containing many resonances from the Gortonian vision. Separately, the disarmer vision has begun to reclaim its ground, championing the nuclear ban treaty as the way forward, and urging Australian signature and ratification.

But what’s striking about the recent national conversation on nuclear weapons has been the relative absence of the Menzian voice. Governments have traditionally been key supporters of that vision because it articulates a centrist, moderate view of nuclear order, and because it allows Australia to benefit from nuclear deterrence while bearing few of the costs. Moreover, it adds meaning and purpose to Australia’s long-running efforts to strengthen global and regional non-proliferation regimes.

But in recent years, public defence of nuclear deterrence has been confined to a few references in Defence white papers. Ministers and departmental heads, for whom the complexities of nuclear order were once the grist of daily debate, have moved on to other priorities, as though the big nuclear questions have all been settled.

That’s wrong. Nuclear issues are returning rapidly to the international agenda. Menzians need to find their voice—and soon. If they don’t, the other two visions will begin to compete over the empty middle ground. And Australians would find that competition bitter and divisive.

Nuclear weapons and appropriate use

In Senate estimates last week, Senator Lisa Singh raised with representatives from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade the issue of possible use of nuclear weapons. ‘In what circumstances’, she asked, ‘does the government’s security doctrine anticipate that using nuclear weapons would be appropriate?’ The breadth of the question seemed to catch DFAT by surprise. For one thing, Australian declaratory doctrine—as set forth in various defence white papers—doesn’t really address the issue of direct use. And, reasoning from first principles, the question seems to invite either an overly simplified answer or an overly complicated one. The simple answer, of course, is that use of nuclear weapons is appropriate when vital interests are under threat and conventional weapons don’t suffice. DFAT’s Richard Sadleir gave a variant of that answer by saying that extreme emergencies of a self-defensive nature constituted the appropriate circumstances. But I think the more complicated answer should also be rehearsed.

First, let’s clarify what ‘use’ of nuclear weapons actually means. This is, after all, a class of weaponry typically associated with deterrence, which means that ‘use’ mostly occurs as ‘threats to use’; weapons are rattled rather than fired. The flagging of nuclear options is intended to constrain adversary behaviour during crises. That’s an infrequent, but important part of modern great-power relations. Moreover, Australian declaratory policy endorses this form of use—see paragraph 5.20 of the 2016 Defence White Paper, for example. Coercive threats to use nuclear weapons usually occur when large stakes are involved—as they were in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the stakes of war, Raymond Aron once wrote, are the existence, the creation and the elimination of states. Considerations of that magnitude typically underpin such threats.

But reliance upon threats to use rather than actual use is only one form of the ‘gravitational use’ of nuclear weapons. I’m using the term ‘gravitational’ here in the same sense that Robert Art uses it in his essay on the fungibility of force:

When used peacefully, states employ their military power in more subtle, and therefore in less well-defined ways. Used peacefully, military power is held at the ready, and its exact influence on political outcomes becomes more difficult to trace … The peaceful use of military power is akin to a gravitational field among large objects in space: it affects all motion that takes place, but it produces its effects imperceptibly … [T]o focus only on the physical use of military power is to miss most of what states do most of the time with the military power at their disposal.

Nuclear weapons are particularly suited to gravitational use. Indeed, nuclear threats are usually implicit rather than explicit. They sit in the background, and exercise their effects from there. In this broad sense, nuclear weapons have been ‘used’ every day since their invention.

So, nuclear weapons have important roles in peacetime and in crises. But let’s turn to what Senator Singh was probably really asking: in what circumstances would Australia think it appropriate to resort to the direct use of nuclear weapons? The answer’s relatively straightforward: either to respond to an adversary’s use of nuclear weapons, or when vital national interests are at stake and conventional forces are going backwards. True, defining ‘vital’ is a non-trivial task. Still, direct use of nuclear weapons signals that red lines have been crossed—and that further escalation options are on the table.

Some analysts write as though direct use of nuclear weapons signals an end of deterrence. It doesn’t. Rather, it puts increased emphasis on what’s called ‘intra-war deterrence’: even when the nuclear threshold has been crossed, both adversaries have strong interests in damage-limitation and war-termination, and are thus ‘deterred’ from open-ended escalation.

Now we come to an important part of the issue: some might think that Australians would approve of direct nuclear use only in the event that Australia itself were being threatened. I don’t think that’s true. Australian security is shaped heavily by the global strategic order. And that order is principally determined far from our shores—typically in the critical force balances around the Eurasian rimlands and between the world’s great powers. Direct use of nuclear weapons in relation to those strategic balances is much more likely than it is in relation to, say, defence of the Australian continent. That’s why US extended nuclear assurances to NATO countries, and to Japan and South Korea, tend to be more explicit than they are to Australia.  So, would we think that use of nuclear weapons was appropriate in relation to serious threats to the vital interests of the US or its other allies? It would depend on the circumstances, of course, but the answer’s probably ‘yes’.

I’m aware none of that makes for pleasant reading. We’re talking here about extremely serious strategic challenges—the sort that, in the past, have provoked world wars. The threat of nuclear war has done much to hold such a prospect at bay. Since nuclear weapons are probably going to be with us for some decades yet, Australia’s interests lie in responsible nuclear powers, good stewardship of nuclear arsenals, and adroit diplomacy in crises—including crises where the threshold is crossed.

Four models in search of a tailor

LGM-118A Peacekeeper missile system being tested at the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.At a seminar in the Stimson Center in late August, Brad Roberts, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defense, canvassed the future of US extended deterrence and strategic stability in Northeast Asia. In an attempt to wrestle with the question of whether or not extended deterrence needed further ‘tailoring’ in the region, Roberts sketched out four alternative models for the future. (The associated paper is here (PDF).)

The four models can be briefly summarised as follows:

  1. a continuation of the current system, whereby US nuclear weapons are only forward deployed into the region during times of crisis
  2. a return to the system in vogue during the Cold War, when US nuclear weapons were routinely deployed in the region, both on land and at sea
  3. a NATO-like system whereby allies carry more responsibility for the stationing of warheads and provision of delivery systems, and are engaged in a high-level Nuclear Planning Group
  4. the emergence of a set of independent national nuclear arsenals that replicate British and French proliferation in the 1950s and 1960s. Read more