In 1961, Mao declared he would build nuclear weapons “even if the Chinese had to pawn their trousers.” He was expressing a sentiment the West would hear often, from various leaders, in the years that followed. In starting Pakistan’s quest for the bomb, Prime Minster Zulfikar Ali Bhutto famously said that his people would “eat grass,” if need be, to go nuclear. Starving millions did not deflect North Korea from its program. Put simply, no police state has qualms about pursuing weapons amidst its population’s destitution, even literal starvation.
Mao rejected Russia as patron and ally in 1962, sundering China’s alliance with Russia after Khrushchev stopped supporting his nuclear program. The next year, President Kennedy approached the Russians about seeking to stop China’s program, possibly by nuclear means. Despite their split with China, the Russians refused to join the U.S. effort, as the superpower rivalry then was at its height.
Like Russia’s 1949 test of a clone of the Nagasaki bomb, China’s first atomic bomb test, in October 1964, caught international observers completely by surprise. Stillman and Reed note that from the outset, China’s instrumentation was “sophisticated in the extreme.” This test weapon—a uranium bomb—was four times more efficient in its explosive yield– to-weight ratio than was the Hiroshima uranium device. Danny Still-man visited China’s Lop Nor test facility in 1998, and the astonished weapons designer found it to be seven times larger than the U.S. test site in Nevada. In 1966 China tested its first H-bomb.
This test strained relations between the Russians and Chinese, and in 1969, the USSR apparently considered launching a nuclear first strike over border clashes with China. Chinese documents shown Henry Kissinger verify that Russia and China were so close to nuclear war that Chinese ruler Mao Zedong ordered government officials to disperse from Beijing in the summer of 1969. The Soviets deployed over a million troops along the Russo-Chinese border. Mid-level officials asked counterparts in various chancelleries around the globe how their governments would react to a Soviet nuclear first strike aimed at China’s nuclear installations.
Aware of these signals, senior American officials publicly voiced grave concern that war might break out, in an effort to signal that the U.S. would not support such a move. Fear of a potential full-scale Sino-Soviet war was a key trigger that induced the newly nuclear-armed Mao to seek formal diplomatic relations with the U.S., and led to the famous 1972 handshake with Nixon.
In his penetrating diplomatic history On China, Kissinger assesses Mao’s overall posture on nuclear weapons. Mao grasped that in the 1950s America’s nuclear arsenal was far too small to destroy China, with its vast geographic area and 600 million people. Kissinger is not convinced that Mao was serious about being willing to sacrifice 300 million people in a nuclear war, but clearly Mao had a far greater willingness to tolerate mass casualties than did America and its Western allies. Mao told Kissinger in October 1975 that American public opinion would prevent the U.S. from using nuclear weapons to help overmatched NATO conventional forces ward off a Soviet attack. In the same conversation Mao rejected Kissinger’s statement that the U.S. would use nuclear weapons to defend its Mideast ally Egypt.
China’s current leaders seem to share Mao’s view of the western Pacific as an area within China’s sphere of influence, and thus can be expected to vigorously pursue a diplomatic and military strategy of seeking to supplant America as the predominant western Pacific power. It has embarked on an impressive military program, in apparent pursuit of just that objective.
Avoiding a Collision in the Pacific
CHINA’S BOMB total is not known—estimates range from the low 200s to the high 400s. Recent scholarship, however, suggests that China may have several times that many nuclear weapons. It has built an “Underground Great Wall,” an incredible 3,000 miles of huge tunnels through which mobile missiles are transported. And its huge military buildup in pursuit of dominance in the western Pacific would be far more formidable if joined with a large, modern nuclear arsenal.
The International Panel on Fissile Materials, a 16-country group comprising states with and without nuclear weapons, estimated in its 2011 report that China has 16 tons of weapons-grade uranium. According to nuclear proliferation expert Henry Sokolski, that is enough to make 1,000 first-generation uranium bombs and 3,000 advanced-design uranium bombs. China also is believed to possess an estimated 1.8 tons of plutonium—enough to make 450 crude plutonium bombs and 900 advanced plutonium bombs.[23] Sokolski points out that U.S. intelligence estimates of 240 Chinese nuclear warheads make four questionable assumptions: 1. no missile reloads, 2. no tactical nuclear weapons, 3. no nuclear-armed cruise missiles, and 4. all warheads are high-yield thermonuclear weapons. These assumptions run contrary to Russian and U.S. force deployments. Both Russia and the U.S. have deployed tactical nuclear weapons, nuclear-armed cruise missiles, and warheads across a range of low to high yields. Russia has long deployed silo reload capabilities for its land-based missiles.
These factors, and their implications, seem to have escaped the Obama administration, which aims to “set an example” for other nations by reducing the number of U.S. weapons. Lost in the fog of this thinking is that the fewer weapons the U.S. retains, the greater incentive China has to increase its arsenal. Far from setting an example, a shrinking stockpile of American weapons increases the payoff of each bomb deployed by a rival power seeking to displace American influence, or by an enemy power seeking to destroy America outright. In a strategic environment where America has 10,000 nuclear weapons, whether China has 100, or 500—or even 1,000—probably counts for little. A China armed with far fewer nuclear weapons than America is less likely to risk a major confrontation over Taiwanese independence, or intervene in a second full-scale Korean war.
But suppose—as “minimum deterrence” proponents advocate—the U.S. was to go down to, say, 300 weapons—the number floated as an option by the Obama administration. China’s weapons would instantly become more valuable on the strategic chessboard. A China armed with 1,000 nuclear weapons facing an America with only 300 would likely act far more boldly—and much more boldly if the U.S. were to go all the way to nuclear zero. Even a China having nuclear parity with the United States would be tempted to act more boldly in a crisis than it is prepared to do today.
History supports this view. During the Cuban Missile Crisis the U.S. had 2,962 deliverable nuclear bombs and warheads on 15-minute alert status, dwarfing Russia’s arsenal. Khrushchev was bluffing, and the Americans knew it. During the diplomatic negotiations after the crisis, Soviet special envoy Vasily V. Kuznetsov told his American counterpart, John J. McCloy: “You will never do this to us again.” He meant that Washington would never again have the overwhelming nuclear superiority to force Moscow to back down. But that nuclear balance was to change by the time of the next big crisis.
The 1973 U.S.-Soviet confrontation during the Yom Kippur War offers an even closer historical parallel than the Cuban Missile Crisis to a possible future collision between the U.S. and China in the western Pacific.
Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat ordered his troops to invade the Israeli-occupied Sinai Desert on October 6, 1973, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Israeli leaders declined to mobilize despite signs of preparation for war, never imagining that Egypt would choose the holiest day of the Jewish calendar to launch its attack. As Egyptian troops breached Israel’s southwestern defensive lines at the Suez Canal and sped across the Sinai Peninsula on Yom Kippur, Syria struck Israel’s northeast, the rocky farmland of the Golan Heights. Israel hastily rushed troops to both fronts, but a country with little geographic strategic depth had to initially yield ground it could hardly afford to cede. The war turned around when Israeli general Ariel Sharon—in a move reminiscent of maneuvers by General George S. Patton—crossed the Suez Canal and encircled Egyptian troops.