3 nuclear superpowers, instead of 2, usher in a new strategic era

WASHINGTON - On the Chinese coast, just 217 kilometers from Taiwan, Beijing is preparing to start up a new reactor that the Pentagon considers the fuel for a vast expansion of China's nuclear arsenal, potentially making it an atomic pair of the United

and Russia.

The reactor, known as

, is excellent for making

, one of the main fuels for atomic bombs.

When President Xi Jinping of China met with President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow last month, the Russian and Chinese nuclear authorities signed an agreement to expand their cooperation for years.

Photo Grigory Sysoyev/Agence France-Presse, via Sputnik

Nuclear material for the reactor is supplied by Russia, whose nuclear giant

has completed in recent months the delivery of 25 tons of highly enriched uranium to kick-start production.

This agreement means that

now cooperating on a project that will contribute to their own nuclear modernization and, according to Pentagon estimates, to the creation of arsenals whose combined size could

This new reality is prompting a broad rethinking of US nuclear strategy that few anticipated a dozen years ago, when President

envisioned a world moving inexorably toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

Instead, the United States now faces questions of how to manage a three-way

, calling into question much of the deterrence strategy that has successfully prevented nuclear war.

The Pentagon, in Arlington, Va., on April 13, 2023. (Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times)

China's expansion, at a time when Russia is deploying new types of weapons and threatening to use combat nuclear weapons against Ukraine, is just the

of what US strategists see as a new era far more complex than the one that the United States lived through. United during the Cold War.

China insists that the offshore breeder reactors will be for purely civilian purposes, and there is no evidence that China and Russia are working together on the weapons themselves, or on a

to deal with their common adversary.

But John F. Plumb, a senior Pentagon official, recently told Congress:

"You can't get around the fact that breeder reactors are plutonium, and plutonium is for weapons."

It may just be the beginning.

In an inconspicuous announcement when the president

Chinese

 met with President

in Moscow last month, Rosatom and the China Atomic Energy Authority signed an agreement to extend their cooperation for years, if not decades.

"In the 2030s, the United States will face, for the first time in its history, two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries," the Pentagon said last fall in a policy document.

"This will create new tensions over stability and new challenges for deterrence, security, arms control and risk reduction."

In recent weeks, US officials have sounded almost

about limiting

China's

"There is probably nothing we can do to stop, slow down, disrupt, intercept or destroy China's nuclear development program that they have projected for the next 10 to 20 years," said General Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

, before Congress late last month.

Milley's words are especially harsh considering that the United States has spent years trying to move the world away from nuclear weapons.

Obama launched a strategy to reduce America's reliance on nuclear weapons in the hope that other powers would follow suit.

Now the opposite is happening.

Putin's failures on the battlefield are making him even more

on his nuclear arsenal.

The only remaining treaty limiting the size of US and Russian arsenals,

, expires in about 1,000 days, and US officials admit there is little chance of forging a new treaty as long as the Ukraine war continues to rage.

Even if Russia and the United States could sit down to negotiate a new treaty, its value would be eroded unless China signed up to it as well.

Beijing has not shown any interest.

The Chinese leader does not hide his expansion plans.

China now has about

, according to an annual study by the Federation of American Scientists.

The latest Pentagon report on the Chinese military, released in November, said the number of nuclear warheads could rise to 1,000 by the end of the decade, and to 1,500 around 2035, if current rates continue.

Underscoring the urgency of the problem, the State Department in recent weeks convened a group of experts and gave it 180 days to submit recommendations, stating that "the United States is entering one of the most complex and challenging periods for the global nuclear

. , potentially more than during the Cold War."

The dynamics are indeed more complicated now:

in the Cold War only two main actors participated, the United States and the Soviet Union;

China was an afterthought.

Its force of some 200 nuclear weapons was so small that it barely figured in the debate, and Beijing never participated in major arms control treaties.

Still, there are reasons to be wary of worst-case analysis of nuclear capabilities.

China and Russia have a long history of mutual mistrust.

And the Pentagon is no stranger to threat inflation, which can free up budgets.

Recently, some experts have criticized his warnings.

"When you dig deeper, there are a lot of questions," said Jon B. Wolfsthal, a National Security Council nuclear official during the Obama administration.

"Even if they

we are monitoring this and we have the capacity to react."

However, some critics have begun to echo the new Pentagon assessments, sometimes offering higher estimates than those of the Biden administration.

On Capitol Hill it is debated whether the next expansion of the Chinese arsenal requires an entirely new approach.

Some Republicans have started talking about expanding the nuclear arsenal after New START expires, so that it can be equated to a

, used in a coordinated fashion against the United States.

Others consider it an overreaction.

"I think it's crazy to think we're going to have two nuclear wars at the same time," said Matthew Bunn, a Harvard professor who tracks nuclear weapons.

In China, build weapons and refuse to negotiate

China entered the nuclear club in October 1964, with a nuclear test at Lop Nor that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations briefly thought of sabotaging.

" strategy

, dismissing the Cold War arms race as a phenomenal waste of money.

Limiting the arsenal to a few hundred weapons remained China's approach until Xi changed course.

It now seems unlikely that there will be any question of halting the growth of China's nuclear arsenal until it approaches the size of the other two superpowers.

In a speech outlining his agenda for his next term in power, the Chinese leader told a Communist Party congress in October that his country must "establish a strong system of

."

The escalation of tensions between Beijing and Washington appears to have hardened Xi's view that China must counter "total containment" even with a stronger nuclear deterrent.

Even experts who believe China's breeder reactors face many technological hurdles see other signs the country is expanding its nuclear weapons potential, including spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plants, new reactors that appear to play no role in the civilian power grid, and construction activity at the Lop Nor nuclear test site.

"Chinese leaders are even more determined to focus on long-term Sino-US competition and, if necessary, confrontation," said Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace's Nuclear Policy Program. International.

China's nuclear expansion, he said, is "above all to shape America's assessment of the international balance of power, and to make it accept the reality that China is about to become an equally powerful country."

The biggest announcement of Chinese ambitions has been the three vast missile silo fields being built in its arid northern reaches.

In total, the silo fields could house some

potentially armed with multiple warheads.

In the past, China stored most of its missiles separate from its nuclear warheads, meaning Washington would have significant warning if Beijing considered escalation.

This would buy time for diplomacy.

The new solid-fuel missiles likely to be installed in the silos are more likely to be attached to their nuclear warheads - much like US designs - which would reduce the time it would take to launch them, M. Taylor Fravel said. , a professor at the

, who studies the Chinese military.

"China wants to remove any shadow of doubt in the mind of the United States about its deterrence," he said.

China is also improving its "triad" - the three ways of delivering nuclear weapons from land, sea and air - paralleling how the United States and the Soviet Union made their atomic threats almost invulnerable during the Cold War.

For example, the Chinese navy is working on a new generation of missile-launching submarines, replacing current ones that are so noisy that US forces have little trouble tracking them.

There are fears in Washington that Xi has learned the lesson of Putin's nuclear threats and may brandish his new weapons in a conflict over Taiwan.

In Russia and the United States, the deployment of new weapons China's expansion comes after Russia and the United States spent decades negotiating one deal after another to reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals, which at their peak had some 70,000 weapons.

At present, each part has 1,550 long-range weapons.

's inauguration

, he and Putin extended the New START agreement for five years.

But since the invasion of Ukraine, the treaty is in shambles.

Putin recently announced that he was suspending the agreement.

Although the limit of 1,550 has been adhered to, almost all other treaty obligations have been removed, including mutual inspections and the sharing of data on each other's stockpiles.

Putin strives to improve his arsenal.

Five years ago, he used video animations of Russian weapons pointed at Florida to show five new kinds of nuclear weapons that he said could defeat the West in a war, including one he called "invincible."

At the time, Western analysts suggested that Putin, with a weak economy, was bluffing.

Only two of those weapon systems have advanced, while three others - including the "invincible" nuclear cruise missile - are mired in delays, test failures and doubts about their viability.

In general, according to some analysts, the new weapons are a distraction.

What really matters is Russia's modernization of its Cold War arsenal into a much more survivable force than the

from the Soviet Union.

"That's 95% of what's going on," said Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Nuclear Information Project, a private Washington research group.

"People talk about big new systems that will change everything. But of course they won't."

The Pentagon views at least one of the emerging weapons as potentially threatening, in part because, if perfected, it could bypass US missile defenses.

It is a long-range nuclear-powered underwater torpedo that, once unleashed, could move autonomously towards one of the country's coasts.

Its warhead, according to the Russian description, would create "areas of extensive radioactive contamination that would be unsuitable for military, economic or other activities for long periods of time."

Kristensen claimed that the torpedo was about to become operational.

For its part, the Biden administration has announced plans to manufacture the first new warhead for the nation's nuclear arsenal since the Cold War, an upgrade the White House says is long overdue for security reasons.

The weapon, for submarine missiles, is one small part of a gargantuan overhaul of the nation's complex of atomic bases, plants, bombers, submarines and land-based missiles.

Its cost over 30 years could reach 2 trillion dollars.

Beijing and Moscow point to the revision as a motivating factor for their own updates.

Arms controllers see a spiral of moves and counter-moves that threatens to increase the risk of miscalculation and war.

Like all superior nuclear weapons, the new warhead, known as W93, is thermonuclear.

That means a tiny atomic bomb at its core acts as a match to ignite the weapon's hydrogen fuel, which can produce explosions a thousand times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb.

Atomic detonators are usually made of plutonium.

Experts say that this is what happens with the Beijing arsenal and explains its construction of breeder reactors.

The United States has about 40 tons of leftover Cold War plutonium available for weapons and doesn't need more.

However, it is building two new plants that can transform old plutonium into detonators for revamped and new thermonuclear weapons, such as the W93.

Recently, the agency that investigates for Congress estimated that new plants could cost as much as $24 billion.

Many gun controllers condemn the new installations.

They say that Washington has in storage at least 20,000 plutonium detonators from retired hydrogen bombs and that some of them could be recycled if necessary.

Despite these criticisms, the Biden administration is forging ahead, insisting that detonator recycling is risky.

Jennifer M. Granholm, the Secretary of Energy, has stated that the new plants are essential for "a

."

Modernizing an aging nuclear force, as Granholm suggests, is one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement.

But it does not address the broader strategic challenge.

"We don't know what to do," said Henry D. Sokolski, a former Pentagon official who now heads the Center for Nonproliferation Policy Education.

"What's the answer to this – we just build more, and we're going to be able to build a lot more than they do?"

c.2023 The New York Times Company

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