China’s expanding nuclear ambitions and Trump’s visit

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0:39It's Monday, May 11th. I'm Greg Dixon. In a few minutes, why is China expanding its nuclear arsenal? First, President Trump heads to Beijing this week in an effort to stabilize the relationship between the two great powers. But the Iran war, now in its third month, hangs over the visit. NPR's Tamara Keith tells us more. When President Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping last fall, the two leaders turned down the temperature on what had been an escalating trade war. On Air Force One afterward, Trump didn't hold back. From zero to 10, with 10 being the best, I would say the meeting was at 12.

1:18And in the lead-up to this state visit, Trump built the hype. That's going to be a wild one. I said, but we have to put on the biggest display you've ever had in the history of China. You know, last time I went to China, President Xi, he treated me so well. The trip was pushed back six weeks with the idea that the war with Iran would be over. Instead, it smolders on, with Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz causing economic shock around the world. Kurt Campbell is chairman of the Asia Group and did China policy in the Biden administration. The president's anticipation was that he would go to Beijing in a position of strength, that we would have prevailed in Iran just like we did in Venezuela, but try as they might, it's harder to spin this as an unalloyed success.

2:14Instead, headed into two days of ceremony and bilateral meetings, Trump is emphasizing his relationship with President Xi. Here he was in an interview with Fox business anchor Maria Bartiromo. He's somebody I get along with very well. Just wrote me a beautiful letter. He wrote you a letter? Yeah, he did. He responded to a letter that I wrote because I had heard that China is giving weapons to, I mean, you're seeing it all over the place, to Iran. Trump said he asked Xi not to supply Iran with weapons. And he wrote me a letter saying that essentially he's not doing that. While other presidents scolded Xi about human rights and warned him to leave Taiwan alone, Trump has expressed an admiration for Xi and the power he wields within China.

3:01Dennis Wilder is a professor at Georgetown University and was a top advisor to President George W. Bush on China policy. It's not just hyperbole, but the president is his own China officer. And he believes he understands Xi Jinping. He believes he can negotiate good deals with China. It's not clear what deals may come out of this trip, but Trump is traveling with a very large delegation, including company CEOs. There are widespread expectations that China will announce plans to purchase soybeans and other farm goods, as well as Boeing airplanes. There's also talk of formalizing the trade truce between the two nations by creating a board of trade.

3:45And Wilder points out this is just the first of four potential meetings between Trump and Xi this year, including a state visit for Xi to the U.S. in the fall. What we're seeing here is the setup for a year of intense dialogue to try and reset to a certain degree the U.S.-China relationship. That relationship is now vastly different than it was when Trump first visited China as president nearly a decade ago. Ollie Wine of the International Crisis Group says back then, China put on a big display to convince Trump and the U.S. that it should be seen as America's confident and capable competitor.

4:26This time around, in the run-up to the meeting between President Trump and President Xi, the Chinese side doesn't have to make that case because U.S. officials are making that case themselves. beginning with President Trump. The White House National Security Strategy, released late last year, describes China as a near peer, while the two nations remain locked in a long-term competition for global dominance. Tamara Keith, NPR News. As part of that competition for global dominance, China has expanded its military and it's growing its nuclear program. China's nuclear arsenal is still small compared to the U.S.

5:04and Russia, but it has doubled in size in the last decade. And Pierre's Emily Feng has been looking into China's nukes, and her story starts in the 1960s, when China first developed a nuclear weapon. The threat Beijing wanted to deter then was not the U.S. So China, they focused on the arsenal target for the Union. It was the Soviet Union, says Hui Zhang, who researches China's nuclear history at Harvard University. In the past, when China and U.S. have a very good friendship, then no worry about whether China have a really second-strike attitude with U.S. Zhang says trust in U.S. restraint, however, started waning in 1999 during a NATO air campaign against the then Yugoslavia.

5:47The 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. 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.

6:35Those 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. And he says China under Xi Jinping also wanted to be a regional power that could stand up to the U.S.

7:11And 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. build its nuclear capabilities. That's according to M. Taylor Fravel.

7:48He'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.

8:26by 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's also fielding submarine-launched 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.

9:09It'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.

9:46You'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. 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.

10:29And that's the Zetong Nuclear Weapons Complex. That's a complex of five areas that includes a road-to-rail transfer point. 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.

11:13And the tricky thing about security dilemmas, Fravel says, is they are much easier to slip into than to get out of. It's NPR's Emily Feng.

11:26And that's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.