Understanding China’s ambition to expand its nuclear program

0:00Emily Feng:It's Consider This where every day we go deep on one big news story. In just a few days, President Trump will meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. It's the first visit from a U.S. president in nearly a decade. The last one was in 2017 during Trump's first term in office. Xi welcomed Trump with a grand ceremony.

0:23Emily Feng:A Chinese military band performed the U.S. national anthem as the two leaders stood side by side on a sprawling red carpet, cascading down the steps of Beijing's Great Hall of the People. Later, President Trump lavished praise on President Xi and his country. My feeling toward you is an incredibly warm one. As we said, there's great chemistry. And I think we're going to do tremendous things for both China and for the United States. President Trump has long boasted about his strong personal relationship with Xi, despite the competitive relationship between the two countries. But what is it really like to meet with President Xi?

1:02Emily Feng:I asked former U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns about that. He served under President Biden. I'm curious whether you have any insight into his character and any potential rapport he might have with President Trump. He is very experienced. He's been president since 2012. He has now dealt with President Obama, President Trump, and President Biden. and he knows all of them well. He is a listener. He's, I think, highly intelligent. He will be steely-eyed, not very perhaps outwardly friendly in most of these meetings. All business. And there is a lot of business for the two leaders to discuss for this upcoming summit.

1:43Emily Feng:Some of the key issues at stake include things like trade, tariffs, and of course, security. Near the top of that security agenda will be the expansion of China's nuclear arsenal. Over the last decade, China has ramped up its nuclear weapons program, along with its production of missiles that could carry a nuke. Consider this. How much has U.S. foreign policy influenced China's nuclear ambitions? And what do those ambitions mean for the threat of a new nuclear arms race? From NPR, I'm Emily Fang. Every single complex society that's ever existed in the history of the world so far has collapsed.

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3:02Emily Feng:It's Consider This from NPR. Over the past decade, China's been investing heavily in bolstering its military and expanding its nuclear program. I wanted to find out why, which brought me back to the 1960s when China became a nuclear power. Our nation successfully explodes its second nuclear bomb in the sky over the western part of our country. Developing a nuclear weapon against steep odds in its western desert. But the threat Beijing wanted to deter then was not the U.S. So China, they focus on the ethanol target for the Union. It was the Soviet Union, says Hui Zhang, who researches China's nuclear history at Harvard University.

3:42In the past, when China and U.S. have a very good friendship, then no worry about whether China has a really second-strike episode with U.S.

3:52Emily Feng:Zhang says trust in U.S. restraint, however, started waning in 1999 during a NATO air campaign against the then Yugoslavia. The U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. It says by mistake, killing three people. And then in 2002, the U.S. withdrew from an anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia, making Beijing nervous. But still, for years after, China kept its nuclear arsenal tiny. At the minimal level, its military thought was strategically necessary. Then in 2012... The new Chinese leaders revealed, led by President-in-waiting Xi Jinping. China's current leader Xi Jinping came to power.

4:32Emily Feng:And he accelerated an ambitious military modernization campaign, including of China's nuclear capabilities. For the first time ever, the United States will have to simultaneously deal with two nuclear peer competitors. Those being Russia and China, says Xie Peixue, a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, which is a think tank affiliated with Taiwan's defense ministry. He says for China's Xi Jinping, the final clincher was in 2018, when the U.S. national defense strategy for the first time designated China as the U.S.'s strategic competitor. competitor. Washington gradually shared its old illusions about China and started treating it like the number one threat to security.

5:18Emily Feng:And he says China under Xi Jinping also wanted to be a regional power that could stand up to the U.S. And so that's why Beijing, especially Xi Jinping, feel the pressure needed to increase the nuclear stock higher. Today, the Pentagon estimates Beijing's nuclear arsenal to be around 600 warheads. That's more than twice what it had a decade ago. But it's still small compared to the more than 5 ,000 warheads the U.S. and Russia each have. Chinese defense officials say they want to max out at about 1 ,000 warheads soon. But Beijing is focused not just on quantity, but also capability, because it has been closely watching the U.S.

5:56Emily Feng:build its nuclear capabilities. That's according to M. Taylor Fravel. He's a professor specializing in security studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What they worried about was that the U.S. was developing what's known as conventional long-range strike weapons that could be used to attack China's nuclear forces. Beijing thus feared such advanced U.S. non-nuclear weapons could take out most of its nuclear arsenal. Whatever few Chinese missiles might survive would then be mopped up by kind of U.S. missile defenses. And so essentially, China would have no means to retaliate. Joseph Rogers, who focuses on nuclear issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, notes Beijing is keeping up with the U.S.

6:39Emily Feng:by developing land, air, and sea launch capabilities. So they have missiles that sit on the backs of trucks and they can drive them into tunnels and move them around a lot. China is also fielding submarine launch ballistic missiles, so they have subs that have missiles on them. One other component of their land leg is these silos. Silos. Five years ago, satellite images revealed China had built missile silo fields where Beijing could bury missiles in the ground to be launched on short notice. It's part of Beijing's effort to create what nuclear experts call launch-on-warning abilities, the ability for China to fire back devastating nuclear missiles even before they're hit themselves.

7:21Emily Feng:It's a powerful deterrent, but it's also a risky one, says Xie in Taipei. This will dramatically shrink the window of decision-making and increase the risk of a nuclear war breaking out by miscalculation. Matt Korda with the Federation of American Scientists discovered one of these silo fields, and he's been tracking them through satellite imaging. So far, he's been unable to confirm if China has loaded any of these fields with actual warheads. But the silo fields have been built out over the years, and Corda can see these Chinese nuclear sites in great detail. You'll see this sort of like a silo hatch.

7:59You'll see a road that comes up to it that will allow for an easy loading process, right? Because these trucks that are carrying these missiles are very big.

8:08Emily Feng:Up until 2024, Chinese state media said these were wind turbine fields. And private retired Chinese senior officials have tried to justify the silo field, saying Beijing must expand over fears the U.S. would hit them first, according to two former U.S. officials who requested anonymity so they could speak candidly about these private discussions. And that also means China is making more nuclear weapons. This year, geospatial analyst Renny Babiars discovered a new nuclear production facility in the mountains of southwestern Sichuan province. And that's the Zetong Nuclear Weapons Complex. That's a complex of five areas that includes a road-to-rail transfer point.

8:51Emily Feng:And a testing area. So it's an area that tests high explosives that are a component of nuclear warheads. China's nuclear expansion has been flagged repeatedly by the Pentagon, which has allocated more resources to deterring China. That may further prompt China to keep expanding its nuclear arsenal, a potentially escalatory cycle which Fravel at MIT says is a classic security dilemma. From the Chinese perspective, they saw the U.S. as more threatening. From a U.S. perspective, they looked at China and its massive, really rapid military modernization began to view China as much more threatening.

9:25Emily Feng:And the tricky thing about security dilemmas, Fravel says, is they are much easier to slip into than to get out of. This episode was produced by Daniel Offman with audio engineering by Ted Meebane. It was edited by Hannah Block, Sarah Robbins, and Michael Levitt. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Emily Fang. This message comes from Capital One with the Venture X Card. Earn unlimited double miles, a$300 annual Capital One travel credit, and access to airport lounges. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Details at CapitalOne.com. This message comes from Odoo.

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