Sleepwalking With the Bomb (18 page)

C
HINA’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.

At this point the Soviet Union began playing aggressive diplomatic and military cards. It had only been in 1972 that Sadat, in a surprise move, had expelled the Soviets from Egypt, and the Soviets saw the war as an opportunity to retrieve their geopolitical position in the Mideast as superpower sponsor of all radical Arab powers. They therefore sought to airlift Soviet commandos into the region.
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Oil-supply leverage became a major factor in responses to the conflict. To punish the U.S. and divide it from its pro-Arab allies, the Saudis declared an oil embargo. Only Portugal permitted American planes to land (on the Azores) and only Greece and Italy offered port facilities to the U.S. Navy. The remaining European allies even refused overflights of U.S. military planes. Worse, NATO member Turkey allowed
Russian
planes to overfly supplies en route to the Mideast.

The Russians had narrowed most of the yawning numerical gap between their nuclear forces and America’s, and perhaps their senior commanders were thinking of Kuznetsov’s promise during the post–Missile Crisis diplomatic negotiations. In the Mediterranean, Soviet ships confronted American ships—including, in an historical irony, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier
John F. Kennedy
—while the war approached its climax on land.

The U.S. Sixth Fleet and the Soviet Mediterranean Fleet were in close proximity, the Soviets shadowing the U.S. Sixth Fleet with more ships than usual for several days. Admiral Daniel Murphy sent a message to headquarters at the end of one tense day: “Both fleets were obviously in a high readiness posture for whatever might come next, although it appeared that neither fleet knew exactly what that meant.”

The American goal was, in significant part, to keep Soviet troops out of the Mideast, thus limiting Soviet influence in the region. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev proposed a joint U.S.-Soviet deployment to share the policing of cease fire lines, and in an urgent letter warned President Nixon: “In the event that the U.S. rejects this proposal, we should have to consider unilateral actions.”

The situation was serious enough for President Nixon to put U.S. forces on DEFCON 3 alert status shortly after he received Brezhnev’s harsh note. (DEFCON—defense condition—3 is a midrange alert status, with DEFCON 1 meaning imminent war; DEFCON 2 was declared for the Strategic Air Command during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the highest alert level since the system was inaugurated in 1959.) “You know we were close to a nuclear confrontation this morning,” President Nixon told Henry Kissinger (then serving as both National Security Adviser and Secretary of State), late on October 25, 1973, the day that the cease fire went into effect.

In the end, the Russians decided not to challenge America directly by trying to land troops in the Mideast, but that month of October had been full of dangerous moments. Nuclear use, though unlikely, was not impossible in the crucible of an intense crisis engaging the fundamental foreign policy interests of both superpowers. Fortunately, in the 11 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the two superpowers had established instant communications and worked out protocols for managing crises. Though nothing is foolproof, such safeguards lessened the chances of a crisis escalating to a shooting war.

In the Yom Kippur War’s Mediterranean crisis phase, a Soviet decision to abort a Mideast airlift avoided possible shoot down of one or more Soviet transports. A shoot down would have triggered the first direct conflict between the superpowers since Berlin in 1961—and this time a shooting war instead of a tense standoff.

Militarily, China eventually may become strong enough to believe that in a shooting war close to home it would prevail. Such a calculation would partly be based upon a perception that America would, under the circumstances, pull its forces back. Were Chinese nuclear forces at numerical parity—or even, as was the case with Russia in 1973, nearing strategic nuclear parity—China might decide to take the chance. The Yom Kippur War model suggests that aggressive moves by covetous powers become bolder as military power grows. Nuclear weapons are regarded by such powers as trump cards. We may not see it that way, but they do. Resolute action may stave off catastrophe, as with Cuba in 1962. But of course there is no cosmic law that our luck will always hold.

Military confrontation is a traditional tool by which dictators distract domestic opposition. China’s autocratic leaders, though often temperamentally risk averse, might choose military confrontation if China faces one or more acute internal crises. Gaming the future always entails speculation. “Black swans”—low-probability but especially grave contingencies—have a habit of suddenly materializing. Call it Murphy’s Law of High-Stakes Geopolitics.

On top of growing military leverage, how much economic leverage does China wield, given its huge trade with America and massive U.S. securities and dollar currency holdings? China expert Gordon Chang points out that because China runs a trade deficit with the rest of its partners, its huge surplus with America makes it vulnerable to the consequences of a sharp drop in trade between the countries. In 2011 China ran a record $295.5 billion trade surplus with the U.S., up 90 percent from 2008. Its 2011 surplus was 190.5 percent of its overall net trade surplus, as it ran a deficit with the rest of the world. This factor limits U.S. vulnerability to blackmail by Beijing. Further, huge debtors enjoy a perverse leverage over creditors that small debtors lack. Thus the old adage: “Owe the bank a million, you have a problem. Owe the bank a billion, the bank has a problem.” Add three zeroes for country debtors and the same principle can apply: Owe a country a billion, the debtor has a problem. Owe a trillion, the creditor has a problem. Put simply, huge creditors simply cannot afford to have a mega-debtor go under. If Uncle Sam goes belly up, China’s export-driven economy sells far fewer goods.

China does, however, derive considerable leverage from producing more than 90 percent of the world’s rare-earth elements. This odd series of metallic elements lies just above uranium and plutonium on the periodic table. Half bear names that relate to their discovery in the Swedish island village of Ytterby. They are essential for numerous high-technology applications in computers and specialized equipment. China’s near-monopoly gives it strategic leverage in a future crisis. Though deposits of such elements exist outside China, their extraction elsewhere is more costly. China accepts a level of extractive pollution that Western countries will not tolerate. Were China to put an embargo on rare-earth elements, economies dependent on them—every modern one—would be harmed as rare-earth element prices rose. Their production elsewhere, pollution notwithstanding, would become essential to the West.

America and Australia are now investing in alternate, though higher-cost, supply sources. And because Beijing inflated prices and thus encouraged alternative investment, rare-earth commodity prices are sharply down from their 2010 peaks. Yet because Beijing is potentially in a monopoly position, importing states have strong incentives to continue building alternate facilities, and firms have a strong incentive to seek substitute products where technically feasible.

China and the U.S. are rivals, not mortal enemies. China has too many interests that intersect with American ones to permit real enmity. But China’s yearning to restore the position of power it enjoyed six centuries ago is real. Failure to recognize this and deter Chinese pressure in the western Pacific could lead to a war no one wants. And any shooting war between nuclear powers inherently carries risks of unintended escalation to a nuclear exchange.

Chinese leaders are rational actors, most of whom would not encourage escalation where risk of nuclear conflict exists. But it would take only one bold leader willing to run greater risks than his predecessors—who believed, as Soviet boss Leonid Brezhnev did, that the “correlation of forces” is shifting decisively in his country’s favor—to focus China’s immense energies on triumph in the western Pacific. The Soviet leadership had often been cautious, wary of the immense power of the United States. Yet Leonid Brezhnev was opportunistically tempted in 1973 to take a chance in the Mideast, even with the memory of Nikita Khrushchev’s failed 1962 gamble over Cuba—which Khrushchev, unlike Brezhnev, had planned in advance. Conceivably a Chinese leader might be similarly tempted.

Consider the warning that Lieutenant General Xiong Guang issued to the Clinton administration during the 1996 crisis in the Taiwan Strait, after the U.S. sent the Seventh Fleet into the strait to warn against Chinese military action. The Chinese were trying to intimidate Taiwan during its presidential election campaign, during which the question of seeking permanent independence from the mainland took center stage. The general expressed doubt that America would trade Los Angeles to avenge a Chinese nuclear strike against Taipei.

Herman Kahn warned that strategic gambles by national leaders have been frequent in history: “We tend to forget that throughout history many decision-makers were delighted to accept ‘double or nothing’ tactics if the odds looked sufficiently favorable.” Shifts in the nuclear balance can matter, if—as proved the case in 1973—they change how leaders behave during a crisis. Perceived vulnerability, whether in force structure, force deployment, or will to prevail, can tempt an adversary to take a reckless, potentially catastrophic gamble. U.S. policy, particularly regarding its nuclear arsenal, must focus on making sure China
always
considers the odds of such a gamble hugely unfavorable.