Features | Security | East Asia

What the West Misses About China’s Nuclear Build-up

Until Western analysts honestly grapple with what U.S. and allied conventional capabilities look like from Beijing, no stable strategic relationship with China is achievable.

Western strategists have spent years asking why China is expanding its nuclear arsenal. The answer they reach is usually the same: Beijing is seeking warfighting capability, regional dominance, or leverage over Taipei. The U.S. intelligence community’s 2024 Annual Threat Assessment offered a different explanation, one that deserves far more attention than it has received. China is expanding, it noted, because its leaders fear a U.S. first strike. 

That fear is not irrational. And until Western strategic debate honestly grapples with what U.S. and allied conventional capabilities look like from Beijing, no stable strategic relationship with China is achievable, and disarmament and arms control becomes even less likely. 

The Capability China Sees 

The conventional wisdom holds that long-range cruise missiles and strike aircraft encompass tactical capabilities, useful for suppressing air defenses or striking command posts, but not strategically significant. The physics says otherwise. Two key strategies states use to protect nuclear arsenals – hardening and concealment –  have both been fundamentally compromised by the accuracy revolution and advances in remote sensing. 

The implication is profound: the nuclear stalemate that has underpinned great-power stability since the 1950s may be reversible. Crucially, this erosion is not limited to nuclear delivery systems. U.S. precision cruise missiles – including the Tomahawk and JASSM being used against Iran – achieve kill probabilities against hardened missile silos of the kind China and Russia operate that some analysts estimate are broadly comparable to nuclear ballistic missiles. An earth-penetrating conventional warhead detonating alongside a silo generates ground motions sufficient to destroy the missile within, without using a nuclear explosion – that is to say, without crossing the nuclear threshold, and without triggering the normative and legal constraints that govern nuclear use. 

These are not hypothetical future capabilities. They are weapons in current service, aboard 89 U.S. Navy ships and 53 submarines, carried by F-35s and B-2s, and now being acquired by Japan, Australia, Poland, Finland, and the Netherlands in quantities numbering in the thousands. Japan alone is purchasing 400 Tomahawks and 50 JASSM-ER, fitting them to its F-15J fleet and acquiring two new Aegis destroyers to augment the nation’s ballistic missile defense. The majority of China’s nuclear strategic forces lie within 1,200 kilometers of its coastline, well within stand-off range of these systems. From Beijing’s perspective, this is not an emerging concern, but a present reality. 

The Causal Arrow May Point the Wrong Way 

The prevailing Western narrative frames China’s nuclear expansion as the independent variable requiring a response. The evidence suggests the causality runs the other direction. 

Some analysis of U.S. conventional counterforce and Chinese nuclear forces identified this dynamic years ago: the pursuit of conventional counterforce capability raises concerns about the survivability of nuclear forces and encourages states to maintain and expand their arsenals. This follows the argument that, as counterforce capabilities improve, potential targets will feel compelled to expand arsenal size, diversify delivery systems, and in extreme cases lower launch thresholds, none of which enhance stability. 

The commander of U.S. Strategic Command’s March 2026 congressional testimony confirmed that China has now surpassed 600 deliverable warheads and is on track for more than 1,000 by 2030. China’s construction of three new silo fields and its rapid expansion of road-mobile ICBMs may not be departures from “minimum deterrence’” driven by aggressive ambition alone. They may be, at least in part, a rational response to the perceived erosion of Beijing’s second-strike survivability, the very dynamic analysts have described as inevitable once stalemate becomes reversible. 

This reading does not require taking Beijing’s stated motivations at face value. China’s broader military modernization, including its naval expansion, its militarization in the South China Sea, and the persistent opacity of its nuclear doctrine, reflects ambitions that go well beyond survivability concerns. But acknowledging that some drivers of arsenal expansion are reactive does not require concluding that all of them are. The point is that Western analysis tends to treat the expansion as entirely self-generated, which produces a distorted picture and forecloses policy options that a more accurate diagnosis would open.

Additionally, in a three-nuclear-peer world involving the United States, China, and Russia, classical deterrence models no longer apply cleanly. The combination of any two against one creates potential first-strike dynamics that mutual vulnerability alone cannot resolve. China and Russia have signaled their awareness of this problem. Their 2022 joint statement explicitly named U.S. “advancements in non-nuclear weapons for disarming strikes” as a destabilizing concern, a rare instance of two nuclear-armed rivals jointly identifying a specific capability category as threatening to strategic stability.

Not all analysts draw the same conclusions from this instability. Some argue that the erosion of stalemate makes expanded arsenals and diversified delivery systems inevitable, even rational. Arms control advocates counter that restraint frameworks, if adapted to include conventional strike systems, can still manage the competition. But both sides share a premise: the current trajectory is unsustainable. 

Conventional-Nuclear Entanglement 

The greatest risk to contemporary strategic stability is not a deliberate first strike, but misinterpretation under pressure and ambiguity. China’s conventional and nuclear missile forces share command networks, early warning infrastructure, and in some cases launch platforms under the PLA Rocket Force. 

In a Taiwan contingency, the scenario most analysts identify as the likeliest path to China-U.S. nuclear confrontation, U.S. precision strikes on Rocket Force command and control architecture aimed at degrading China’s conventional anti-ship and land-attack capability could appear, in Beijing’s assessment, indistinguishable from the opening phase of a broader counterforce campaign against its nuclear deterrent. 

This is not a concern raised only by Chinese analysts. In 2017, Caitlin Talmadge modeled precisely this escalation pathway in an article for International Security. Talmadge concluded that U.S. conventional operations against Chinese command infrastructure could trigger nuclear responses regardless of Washington’s intent. When conventional and nuclear capabilities are this deeply entangled, leaders in a crisis may not be able to tell whether they are under conventional attack or nuclear attack, and they will have very little time to decide.

This entanglement is the structural feature of the current military balance that most directly compresses the margin between conventional war and nuclear use. Deterrence ultimately operates through the expectations weapons create, not through the weapons themselves. When those expectations are shaped by capabilities that blur the line between conventional and nuclear counterforce, and when no arms control framework exists to clarify intent, the expectations become dangerously unstable.

The Arms Control Gap 

Existing arms control frameworks were designed for a world in which strategic stability was measured by deployed nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles. Long-range conventional systems were treated as peripheral because their technological maturity was limited. That distinction has dissolved. 

The New START architecture has expired. No successor agreement is on the horizon. China has declined to participate in nuclear arms control discussions, and while the reasons are multiple, including arsenal asymmetry and verification concerns, unresolved fears about U.S. conventional counterforce capability are central among them. The logical conclusion follows: China will not come to the table on nuclear reductions while the conventional threat to its nuclear forces remains unacknowledged and unconstrained. 

The window for addressing this calmly is narrowing. The post-New START vacuum, China’s accelerating arsenal expansion, and the prospective deployment of U.S. long-range missiles in Germany and the Indo-Pacific are creating a self-reinforcing cycle in which each side’s response to perceived vulnerability increases the other’s. Breaking that cycle requires, as a first step, an honest acknowledgement of what U.S. and allied conventional capabilities represent in strategic terms – not as a concession to adversary talking points, but as a precondition for coherent policy. 

Toward an Honest Debate

None of this is an argument for restraining the U.S. and allied conventional posture unilaterally, or for accepting Chinese or Russian characterizations of Western intent at face value. It is an argument for greater analytical accuracy. The gap in Western strategic analysis between what U.S. conventional capabilities actually are and how they are discussed in public debate is not merely an academic failing. It is a policy failure with real strategic consequences. 

Closing that gap would mean, concretely, several things. It would mean NATO communiqués and U.S. strategic posture reviews that acknowledge conventional counterforce as a variable in strategic stability, rather than treating it as categorically separate from the nuclear balance. It would mean the United States offering to include long-range conventional strike systems in the scope of any future arms control framework – not necessarily accepting limits in advance, but signaling that the category is on the table. It would mean congressional testimony from USSTRATCOM and the intelligence community that addresses the entanglement problem directly, rather than presenting Chinese expansion as self-evidently aggressive without examining what it may be responding to. These are not concessions. They are preconditions for a policy that has any chance of slowing the cycle now accelerating between Washington and Beijing. 

Preventing the miscalculation that leads to nuclear use should be the overriding priority of every government with a stake in the outcome. That requires asking the question Western strategic debate has largely avoided: not why China is expanding its nuclear arsenal, but what it is expanding in response to. The answer is uncomfortable. It may also be the only basis on which a more stable order can be built.

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Western strategists have spent years asking why China is expanding its nuclear arsenal. The answer they reach is usually the same: Beijing is seeking warfighting capability, regional dominance, or leverage over Taipei. The U.S. intelligence community’s 2024 Annual Threat Assessment offered a different explanation, one that deserves far more attention than it has received. China is expanding, it noted, because its leaders fear a U.S. first strike. 

That fear is not irrational. And until Western strategic debate honestly grapples with what U.S. and allied conventional capabilities look like from Beijing, no stable strategic relationship with China is achievable, and disarmament and arms control becomes even less likely. 

The Capability China Sees 

The conventional wisdom holds that long-range cruise missiles and strike aircraft encompass tactical capabilities, useful for suppressing air defenses or striking command posts, but not strategically significant. The physics says otherwise. Two key strategies states use to protect nuclear arsenals – hardening and concealment –  have both been fundamentally compromised by the accuracy revolution and advances in remote sensing. 

The implication is profound: the nuclear stalemate that has underpinned great-power stability since the 1950s may be reversible. Crucially, this erosion is not limited to nuclear delivery systems. U.S. precision cruise missiles – including the Tomahawk and JASSM being used against Iran – achieve kill probabilities against hardened missile silos of the kind China and Russia operate that some analysts estimate are broadly comparable to nuclear ballistic missiles. An earth-penetrating conventional warhead detonating alongside a silo generates ground motions sufficient to destroy the missile within, without using a nuclear explosion – that is to say, without crossing the nuclear threshold, and without triggering the normative and legal constraints that govern nuclear use. 

These are not hypothetical future capabilities. They are weapons in current service, aboard 89 U.S. Navy ships and 53 submarines, carried by F-35s and B-2s, and now being acquired by Japan, Australia, Poland, Finland, and the Netherlands in quantities numbering in the thousands. Japan alone is purchasing 400 Tomahawks and 50 JASSM-ER, fitting them to its F-15J fleet and acquiring two new Aegis destroyers to augment the nation’s ballistic missile defense. The majority of China’s nuclear strategic forces lie within 1,200 kilometers of its coastline, well within stand-off range of these systems. From Beijing’s perspective, this is not an emerging concern, but a present reality. 

The Causal Arrow May Point the Wrong Way 

The prevailing Western narrative frames China’s nuclear expansion as the independent variable requiring a response. The evidence suggests the causality runs the other direction. 

Some analysis of U.S. conventional counterforce and Chinese nuclear forces identified this dynamic years ago: the pursuit of conventional counterforce capability raises concerns about the survivability of nuclear forces and encourages states to maintain and expand their arsenals. This follows the argument that, as counterforce capabilities improve, potential targets will feel compelled to expand arsenal size, diversify delivery systems, and in extreme cases lower launch thresholds, none of which enhance stability. 

The commander of U.S. Strategic Command’s March 2026 congressional testimony confirmed that China has now surpassed 600 deliverable warheads and is on track for more than 1,000 by 2030. China’s construction of three new silo fields and its rapid expansion of road-mobile ICBMs may not be departures from “minimum deterrence’” driven by aggressive ambition alone. They may be, at least in part, a rational response to the perceived erosion of Beijing’s second-strike survivability, the very dynamic analysts have described as inevitable once stalemate becomes reversible. 

This reading does not require taking Beijing’s stated motivations at face value. China’s broader military modernization, including its naval expansion, its militarization in the South China Sea, and the persistent opacity of its nuclear doctrine, reflects ambitions that go well beyond survivability concerns. But acknowledging that some drivers of arsenal expansion are reactive does not require concluding that all of them are. The point is that Western analysis tends to treat the expansion as entirely self-generated, which produces a distorted picture and forecloses policy options that a more accurate diagnosis would open.

Additionally, in a three-nuclear-peer world involving the United States, China, and Russia, classical deterrence models no longer apply cleanly. The combination of any two against one creates potential first-strike dynamics that mutual vulnerability alone cannot resolve. China and Russia have signaled their awareness of this problem. Their 2022 joint statement explicitly named U.S. “advancements in non-nuclear weapons for disarming strikes” as a destabilizing concern, a rare instance of two nuclear-armed rivals jointly identifying a specific capability category as threatening to strategic stability.

Not all analysts draw the same conclusions from this instability. Some argue that the erosion of stalemate makes expanded arsenals and diversified delivery systems inevitable, even rational. Arms control advocates counter that restraint frameworks, if adapted to include conventional strike systems, can still manage the competition. But both sides share a premise: the current trajectory is unsustainable. 

Conventional-Nuclear Entanglement 

The greatest risk to contemporary strategic stability is not a deliberate first strike, but misinterpretation under pressure and ambiguity. China’s conventional and nuclear missile forces share command networks, early warning infrastructure, and in some cases launch platforms under the PLA Rocket Force. 

In a Taiwan contingency, the scenario most analysts identify as the likeliest path to China-U.S. nuclear confrontation, U.S. precision strikes on Rocket Force command and control architecture aimed at degrading China’s conventional anti-ship and land-attack capability could appear, in Beijing’s assessment, indistinguishable from the opening phase of a broader counterforce campaign against its nuclear deterrent. 

This is not a concern raised only by Chinese analysts. In 2017, Caitlin Talmadge modeled precisely this escalation pathway in an article for International Security. Talmadge concluded that U.S. conventional operations against Chinese command infrastructure could trigger nuclear responses regardless of Washington’s intent. When conventional and nuclear capabilities are this deeply entangled, leaders in a crisis may not be able to tell whether they are under conventional attack or nuclear attack, and they will have very little time to decide.

This entanglement is the structural feature of the current military balance that most directly compresses the margin between conventional war and nuclear use. Deterrence ultimately operates through the expectations weapons create, not through the weapons themselves. When those expectations are shaped by capabilities that blur the line between conventional and nuclear counterforce, and when no arms control framework exists to clarify intent, the expectations become dangerously unstable.

The Arms Control Gap 

Existing arms control frameworks were designed for a world in which strategic stability was measured by deployed nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles. Long-range conventional systems were treated as peripheral because their technological maturity was limited. That distinction has dissolved. 

The New START architecture has expired. No successor agreement is on the horizon. China has declined to participate in nuclear arms control discussions, and while the reasons are multiple, including arsenal asymmetry and verification concerns, unresolved fears about U.S. conventional counterforce capability are central among them. The logical conclusion follows: China will not come to the table on nuclear reductions while the conventional threat to its nuclear forces remains unacknowledged and unconstrained. 

The window for addressing this calmly is narrowing. The post-New START vacuum, China’s accelerating arsenal expansion, and the prospective deployment of U.S. long-range missiles in Germany and the Indo-Pacific are creating a self-reinforcing cycle in which each side’s response to perceived vulnerability increases the other’s. Breaking that cycle requires, as a first step, an honest acknowledgement of what U.S. and allied conventional capabilities represent in strategic terms – not as a concession to adversary talking points, but as a precondition for coherent policy. 

Toward an Honest Debate

None of this is an argument for restraining the U.S. and allied conventional posture unilaterally, or for accepting Chinese or Russian characterizations of Western intent at face value. It is an argument for greater analytical accuracy. The gap in Western strategic analysis between what U.S. conventional capabilities actually are and how they are discussed in public debate is not merely an academic failing. It is a policy failure with real strategic consequences. 

Closing that gap would mean, concretely, several things. It would mean NATO communiqués and U.S. strategic posture reviews that acknowledge conventional counterforce as a variable in strategic stability, rather than treating it as categorically separate from the nuclear balance. It would mean the United States offering to include long-range conventional strike systems in the scope of any future arms control framework – not necessarily accepting limits in advance, but signaling that the category is on the table. It would mean congressional testimony from USSTRATCOM and the intelligence community that addresses the entanglement problem directly, rather than presenting Chinese expansion as self-evidently aggressive without examining what it may be responding to. These are not concessions. They are preconditions for a policy that has any chance of slowing the cycle now accelerating between Washington and Beijing. 

Preventing the miscalculation that leads to nuclear use should be the overriding priority of every government with a stake in the outcome. That requires asking the question Western strategic debate has largely avoided: not why China is expanding its nuclear arsenal, but what it is expanding in response to. The answer is uncomfortable. It may also be the only basis on which a more stable order can be built.

Dan Plesch is Professor of Diplomacy and Strategy at SOAS University of London. He is the founder of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) in Washington, D.C. and has served as an adviser to the U.K. and U.S. governments.

Manuel Galileo is a foreign affairs and military analyst, Track-II diplomat, civil engineer, and public speaker specializing in strategic stability, AI, and conventional counterforce. He holds an MSc in International Relations (Research) from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MA in Diplomacy from SOAS University of London, and is a Civil Engineer from the University of Bath. 

Arms control agreements

China nuclear build-up

China second strike capabilities

Nuclear Proliferation

U.S. conventional missiles

U.S.-China arms control

U.S.-China strategic stability

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