U.S. defense contractors, and to some extent the Defense Department, anticipate that the U.S. must spend $1 trillion on strategic nuclear weapons partly to counter China. China has a vigorous military modernization program, including strategic nuclear forces. Although China has a far smaller nuclear arsenal than Russia or the United States, China does have the second largest military expenditures in the world after the United States. It shows increasing strength in high-technology weaponry, such as its nuclear aircraft carrier. Xi Jinping has increased these expenditures.
China has the second largest economy in the world. For all its troubles, that economy is growing, it will become larger than the United States economy, and it will support Chinese military modernization for decades to come. In the near term Russia far outweighs China as a strategic nuclear rival of the United States, but Russia’s economy is weak. So in the long term, China could, in theory, become the possessor of a nuclear arsenal on the level of the United States and Russia. And if Russia’s power slips from lack of economic support, then (again in theory), China could take its place as a great threat.
Defense contractors, and to some extent the Defense Department, would say that the possibility of such a strategic race, not just with Russia but in the long term with China, would partly justify the “new Cold War” set of weapons they anticipate the taxpayer buying. This is the proposed $1 trillion arsenal I have discussed in other articles, including a “new Cold War” triad of a new generation of nuclear-weapon-carrying long-range strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and nuclear submarines.
Strategic nuclear discussions do not appear to be big as an overt topic on the agenda of Xi Jinping’s current visit. Topics like cyberwarfare and Pacific relations loom far larger. But it matters for all issues, including weaponry, that Xi Jinping seems more interested in combining his vision of China’s strength with a degree of reassurance. His vision contrasts with, say, the far more threatening and aggressive stance of Vladimir Putin.
And, as for reassurance, Xi Jinping has an extremely important message to get across. First, although China has the second largest military expenditure to the United States, the gap is still great. China’s defense budget will increase to $190 billion in 2015. That is just a fraction of the United States' $600 billion defense budget. China would lose its focus on strength in Asia – which requires the conventional weapons to project strength from Japan to India -- if it shifted all its attention and spending to any kind of matching of the arsenals built up in the Cold War by the United States and Russia.
Second, there is an important distinction in the nature of China’s military modernization. This was addressed by a paper this summer by Stephen J. Cimbala in the Strategic Studies Journal entitled “Chinese Military Modernization: Implications for Strategic Nuclear Arms Control.” As the paper explains, “China’s political and military objectives in Asia and worldwide differ from those of the United States and Russia, reflecting a perception of that nation’s own interests and of its anticipated role in the emerging world order.”
It explains, “China may not aspire to this model of nuclear-strategic parity” of the United States and Russia. So, it explains, “nuclear-strategic parity, as measured by quantitative indicators of relative strength, may be less important to China.” (I should note that Cimbala’s paper does endorse some of the $1 trillion spending, which is the
Undoubtedly, China will project increasing military strength against its neighbors in Asia, and the U.S. must join its Asian allies to contain or manage that. But Xi Jinping’s overall reassuring stance on his state visit to the United States could help the public understand that China does not want the kind of full-scale strategic parity with the United States that Russia built up from 1949 to 1990. To deal with China, we need the weapons to balance China’s growing strength in Asia. But, for that, we do not need to beggar ourselves by spending a trillion dollars for the defense contractors’ vision of a new Cold War.
