INDIA’S WORLD

APLN Senior Research Adviser Manpreet Sethi wrote for India’s World and examined how China’s rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal is part of a deeper shift in Beijing’s deterrence strategy, which is steadily reshaping the Indo-Pacific’s strategic landscape and raising difficult questions for India.

After remaining roughly stagnant around 200–250 for almost four decades, China’s nuclear warhead numbers are believed to have undergone a meteoric rise in recent years. Assessments by the US Department of Defense, the Nuclear Notebook of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and the annual SIPRI report more or less agree that the figures have steadily risen from 320 in 2020, to 350 in 2021, to 500 in 2024, 600 in 2025 and 620 in 2026. The year-on-year increase in warhead numbers makes it the world’s fastest-growing arsenal. But accretion in numbers is only one part of China’s new nuclear story. Of even greater significance are progressive improvements in its nuclear delivery platforms with the development and deployment of road-mobile missiles, solid-fuelled ICBM silos, nuclear-capable aircraft with air-launched ballistic missiles, and the second-generation Jin class SSBNs with long-range, accurate SLBMs.

Put together, the expansion and modernisation of China’s nuclear arsenal have created a new nuclear China. In Beijing’s view, these developments have been dictated by a transformed threat perception from the advancing US ballistic missile defence (BMD) capabilities as well as the possibility that America’s highly accurate, conventional missiles could destroy Chinese nuclear forces. So, to ensure survivability to conduct assured retaliation, and to restore deterrence stability with the US, China had to increase and improve its nuclear capabilities. Washington, however, now perceives China as a ‘pacing threat’ or a near nuclear peer and has embarked on its own efforts to modernise its legacy nuclear delivery platforms and command and control architecture. The fraught US–China nuclear dynamics show little hope of any arms control or even a conversation on strategic stability.

Read the full article on the India’s World website here.

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