China demands ‘drastic and substantive cuts’ to US nuclear arsenal

China called for “drastic and substantive cuts to [the United States] nuclear arsenal” in a dismissive response to Washington’s concern that “multiple nuclear-armed adversaries” could coordinate a joint nuclear weapons threat to the United States.

“It is the U.S. who is the primary source of nuclear threats and strategic risks in the world,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Wednesday. “China urges the U.S. to fulfill its special and primary obligation of nuclear disarmament by further making drastic and substantive cuts to its nuclear arsenal, and stopping nuclear sharing, extended deterrence, expanding nuclear alliance, and other negative moves that undermine global and regional peace and stability.”

Behind the nuclear jargon, the Chinese foreign ministry’s demands mount to a call for the United States to abandon the policy of assuring allies in NATO and the Indo-Pacific that they are protected from their neighbors by U.S. nuclear weapons. Those demands amplify the complaints leveled by Russia and North Korea, which have condemned the U.S. alliances in Europe and northeast Asia while enhancing their own military cooperation amid the Russia-Ukraine war.

“Any one of these nuclear challenges would be daunting by itself, but the simultaneity and growing collaboration and evidence of collusion between them is unprecedented, forcing us to think in new and careful ways about challenges such as deterrence, escalation dynamics, and deterring opportunistic aggression in this new nuclear age,” Dr. Vipin Narang, the outgoing acting assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Aug. 1.

Chinese forces have “begun loading [new nuclear silos] with missiles,” Narang noted, as part of a nuclear expansion by Beijing that has shocked observers in Washington and neighboring capitals. The rapidity and scale of China’s nuclear upgrade is coinciding with more overt threats from Russia and North Korea, leaving U.S. officials to contemplate the possibility that their burgeoning axis of nuclear adversaries could coordinate a multi-theater attempt to coerce the U.S. or its allies.

“Over the past several years, we have refined the strategic concepts and plans that we will need to make deterrence credible in this new nuclear age,” said Narang. ”The president recently issued updated nuclear-weapons employment guidance to account for multiple nuclear-armed adversaries, and in particular the significant increase in the size and diversity of the PRC’s nuclear arsenal.”

Those remarks hinted at the adoption of a new nuclear strategy “that, for the first time, reorients America’s deterrent strategy to focus on China’s rapid expansion in its nuclear arsenal,” as the New York Times reported this week. 

“We now find ourselves in nothing short of a new nuclear age, an unprecedented mix of multiple revisionist nuclear challengers who are uninterested in arms control or risk reduction efforts, each rapidly modernizing and expanding their nuclear arsenals and openly threatening to employ nuclear weapons to achieve their aims,” Narang said. “The growth in and diversification of the Chinese nuclear force, something we neither anticipated nor accounted for when we crafted the Nuclear Modernization Program over a decade ago, will be a defining feature of this new nuclear age.”

Russia, for its part, touted the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s rebuttal on state media pages and offered their own condemnation of U.S. cooperation with Japan — a mainstay of the U.S. alliance network in the Indo-Pacific.

“Japan’s foreign policy poses clear risks to regional stability and security,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Wednesday. “Of particular concern are Japan’s plans to erode the country’s nuclear-free status by joining the United States’ so-called joint nuclear missions, holding multilateral drills involving allied strategic aircraft certified to perform nuclear tasks and discussing the possibility of hosting US medium-range missiles.”

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida fears that China or North Korea will take Russia’s nuclear-shielded invasion of Ukraine as a model for aggression in Asia.

“The ramifications of Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons are not limited to the threat itself,” Kishida has said. “The threat may have already caused serious damage to the nuclear nonproliferation regime. It may have already made it even more difficult for countries seeking to develop nuclear weapons to abandon their plans. Moves to develop and possess nuclear weapons might even spread further to other countries.”

U.S. officials have been working to assure allies that they do not need to obtain their own nuclear weapons, while also coming to terms with the expansion of threats.

“Our current nuclear force posture and plan modernization program is necessary but may well be insufficient in the coming years to support this need,” Narang said. “We must continue to strengthen our network of allies and partners and our extended deterrence efforts in NATO and the Indo-Pacific, because these are our asymmetric advantage over our adversaries.”