Thanks for the chance to contribute to this discussion, and to offer some thoughts – mere personal opinions though they be – to get our discussions going.

Chinese “Strategic Counterbalance” Thinking

First, let me say a word about our emerging understanding of Chinese nuclear weapons thinking. One thing worth emphasizing about recent Chinese nuclear developments – other, of course, than the shocking scale and speed of Beijing’s nuclear buildup – is the clear emphasis in modern Chinese doctrinal statements upon the role of what is often translated as “strategic counterbalance.” (If you put the Chinese term into Google Translate it comes out merely as “strategic checks and balances,” but “strategic counterbalance” probably captures the thought better.)   

This phrasing appears to have surfaced at least as early as 2019 as a term describing one of the key missions of China’s nuclear posture in connection with development of the DF-41 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. 

As recounted in a study last year by the National Burau of Asian Research, Chinese strategic writers tie “strategic counterbalance” thinking to Beijing’s regional ambitions in the Indo-Pacific by describing this doctrine as serving to “enable both deterrence and war” because with it China’s nuclear forces can “compel[] adversaries to always fear and respect us” by “regulating their possible nuclear provocations” in “today’s world of great-power strategic competition.” What does this mean? In a nutshell, summarizes the report, “strategic counterbalance” aims to “deny[] the United States an advantage in U.S.-China competition that can be used to prevent the accomplishment of political objectives such as unification with Taiwan.”

This seems to me a remarkably clear signal that Chinese nuclear strategists have internalized lessons from the modern Russian playbook of using what I myself have long termed an “offensive nuclear umbrella” to facilitate regional aggression. But let me explain that phrasing. We in the West tend to think of nuclear deterrence in fundamentally defensive terms – that is, as a policy the objective of which is to dissuade an adversary from undertaking aggression against us. Our thinking about deterrence, in other words, assumes a baseline of peacetime stability, which it is the aim of nuclear deterrence to prolong by persuading the bad guy that it’s not in his interest to break the peace.

As it showed the world with its initial assault upon Ukraine in 2014 and as it has demonstrated regularly since its full-scale invasion of that country in 2022, however, Russia has sought to use nuclear deterrence not to deter aggression but rather as a tool of aggression. Putin, other words, has sought to employ threats of nuclear escalation to dissuade others from intervening to stop his predatory attacks upon Russia’s neighbors. The point of an “offensive nuclear umbrella” is thus not to keep the peace, but to facilitate breaking it with impunity, protecting Russia against international efforts to help the victims of the Kremlin’s aggression.

The emergence and increasing emphasis on “strategic counterbalance” in Chinese nuclear doctrine signals Beijing’s adoption of this approach as well. The concept also provides an additional explanatory motive for the speed and scale of China’s nuclear buildup: China is arming itself to the nuclear teeth to convince us that intervening to protect Taiwan – and perhaps others in the region – from Chinese aggression I too dangerous to contemplate. 

The doctrine of “strategic counterbalance” is thus, in effect, a clear signal of China’s aggressive intent vis-à-vis its neighbors.  It is how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is seeking to weaponize what academics call the “stability-instability paradox” in support of an agenda of territorial self-aggrandizement and regional hegemony.

I stress these clear implications because on its face, like so many other terms in the Chinese strategic lexicon, “strategic counterbalance” may sound, to the uninitiated, fairly benign. After all, if “strategic stability” is a key goal of our relationship with Beijing as President Trump and Xi have agreed, who wouldn’t be against “balance”?

But seeing some of the aggressive, “offensive nuclear umbrella” thinking that lies behind current Chinese talk of such “balance” helps us understand what they’re really staying. China’s nuclear buildup is in this respect neither aimed at nor consistent with strategic stability as we understand it in the West. To the contrary, for the CCP, “strategic stability” in the Sino-American relationship means us not doing anything to prevent them from invading and annexing their neighbors – and the nuclear doctrine of “strategic counterbalance” helps draw out this important point, which we overlook at our peril.

The Question of Numbers

The second point I’d like to make is to emphasize that we don’t really have any idea – looking at things from the outside as we necessarily must – where the Chinese nuclear buildup will stop. As we all know, the Pentagon’s annual reporting on Chinese progress notes that China is likely to have “over 1,000” nuclear warheads by 2030 and has offer no reason to question its 2022 assessment that at its current pace China is on track to have 1,500 warheads deployed by 2035. Though the total U.S. stockpile are larger than this, it’s worth emphasizing that those American numbers include retired or otherwise non-deployed weapons – with the result that if the United States chooses to remain at New START numbers in the warheads it actually deploys, China could reach functional strategic parity by 2035.

I’ve sometimes heard Western analysts sound reasonably confident that China isn’t actually driving for parity. Given the lack of available evidence, I suppose this is a position than could simply be asserted from the outside as well as can any other. Nevertheless, such claims seem invariably to be based merely upon the assumption that because those Western analysts themselves feel that something like “strategic counterbalance” could probably be achieved without matching U.S. deployed-warhead numbers on a one-for-one basis, China likely thinks this too, and hence isn’t actually aiming for parity. 

To be sure, I would be happier to think China is not sprinting toward strategic parity, but such mirror imaging seems a peculiarly thin line of reasoning upon which to base that conclusion. Absent any actual evidence one way or the other, assuming the least about one’s adversaries doesn’t seem like very wise strategy. If anything, the most intuitively obvious default assumption about numbers when it comes to the intentions of an adversary that talks about the importance of achieving “balance” would surely be to suppose him interested in, well, balancing what you have – which sounds a lot more like parity than it does stopping short of that point.

Indeed, if non-parity were somehow consistent with notions of “counterbalance,” what basis do we have to assume that China doesn’t in fact seek some kind of numerical superiority? I can’t point to any compelling evidence that it does, but I also can’t point to any kind of compelling evidence that it doesn’t. 

In fact, one might be forgiven for suspecting that for a country so focused on “national rejuvenation” from the perspective of returning to a historical baseline of global power and influence set years ago before the advent of European imperial power – back when Chinese dynasties assumed themselves to be preeminent power and the center of human civilization – it might well be that the only appropriate form of “balance” with the rest of the world is really a sort of overmatch.  If the point is to achieve an appropriate relationship of Sinic might and grandeur vis-à-vis the rest of the world rather than just any given single potential adversary, then the “balance” of “strategic stability” could start to sound a lot like outright, awe-inducing superiority.

But my main point is simply to urge epistemological caution.  We really don’t know China’s envisioned end-state here, and we have no basis to rule out dangerous scenarios of overweening ambition.  From a strategist’s perspective, I would think it irresponsible not to plan against the possibility that Beijing’s sprint toward increasingly massive nuclear numbers will continue for some while, perhaps even beyond the point of Sino-American strategic parity. As we explore scenarios of how the United States should respond in sizing its own force posture, it’s very important to keep this in mind.

Chinese Reactions

As for China’s reactions to what the United States might do in the face of contemporary challenges, I am not unworried about the potential escalatory impact of American moves to augment our nuclear arsenal in response to the challenges China’s nuclear sprint presents us. But I also am somewhat less worried about this than some Western analysts.

After all, China already seems to assume that we are the party most likely to use nuclear weapons first in the escalation of a conventional fight over Taiwan. (More on that in a moment.). Indeed, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has already made it a key component of its force sizing construct to try to scare us out of helping Taiwan through a huge nuclear buildup, an approach clearly based upon the assumption that U.S. nuclear first use in a Western Pacific scenario is a real enough possibility to require special deterrence. (As noted, thinking about such dissuasion is precisely the logic behind PLA “strategic counterbalance” doctrine.)

In this sense, possible American first use is already to some extent “priced into” Chinese policy. Accordingly, U.S. efforts to give ourselves more sub-strategic options – such as by augmenting theater-level nuclear capabilities – might therefore be less startling and destabilizing to China than many Americans think. Such moves would surely still be unwelcome in Beijing, of course, precisely because they would increase our ability to deter Chinese aggression by giving us more options as “rungs” on the proverbial “escalation ladder” than we presently possess. And it’s certainly possible this could encourage China to accelerate changes already underway, such as in developing and deploying more and more theater-class weapons itself.

Nevertheless, such American responses to Chinese nuclear power probably wouldn’t represent a signal of potential limited U.S. nuclear use that would be dangerously alarming to Beijing, precisely because the Chinese already anticipate that possibility. It should also be remembered here that PLA thinking about “strategic counterbalance” is, as the phrasing suggests, thinking about strategic capabilities: the primary locus by which China anticipates deterring U.S. intervention to save Taiwan seems to be its mushrooming intercontinental arsenal anyway. In this respect, better American nuclear capabilities at the theater level would help somewhat from the U.S. perspective, but they would neither wholly solve the broader problem Washington faces nor wholly undermine Chinese strategy. (Nor, surely, would such American augmentations be more worrying in Beijing than some scenarios in which the United States didn’t react more assertively to China’s growing arsenal, such as if declining faith in Washington’s alliance guarantees led countries such as Japan or South Korea to develop their own nuclear weapons.)

Nuclear Blindspots?

My fourth comment is spurred by how it feels like U.S. and Chinese strategists look at the possibility for limited nuclear use in Pacific scenarios. It used to be a pet peeve of mine that U.S. wargames exploring regional conflict scenarios with either Russia or China always seemed to stop at “boom” – that is, such games shut down the moment anybody first used a nuclear weapon. That, it always seemed to me, was foolish. 

This was a way in which I feared that longstanding efforts in the arms control community to encourage Western belief in a sort of “nuclear taboo” were selling us short.  It was, I felt, a form of willful strategic blindness to stop thinking about nuclear escalation dynamics just when first nuclear use in a wargame made managing such challenges more critical than ever.  

But “nuclear taboo” thinking discouraged admitting that limited nuclear use was even possible without some inevitable rush toward Armageddon, and it encouraged us to shut down wargames just when they had arguably become most important, interesting, and pedagogically useful for anyone seeking to manage nuclear escalation risks.  “Nuclear taboo” psychology risked precluding Western intellectual exploration of whatever possibilities might exist in between the proverbial options of “suicide or surrender” in a regional conflict with a nuclear-armed peer. This, I feared, could encourage fatalistic American predispositions toward “surrender” that might themselves be perceived by our adversaries and hence help precipitate the very aggression it should be the business of our nuclear weapons posture to deter. 

To be sure, much of this has now changed, and I’ve already been involved in multiple wargames in the last two or three years in which things are indeed allowed to progress at least somewhat “right of ‘Boom.’” This is valuable, and is a sign of intellectual and strategic progress.

Nonetheless, it still seems to me that there might be some blind spots in how both sides think about first-use scenarios. 

Most U.S.-China wargames exploring limited use in which I’ve been involved, at least, assume that it is China that is likely to “go first” in using nuclear weapons if an invasion of Taiwan proves harder than expected and Beijing starts losing the conventional campaign. Such games imagine that rather than face the arguably existential threat to CCP control that could be presented by a lost war that basically forever precludes so-called “reunification” with Taiwan, China might opt to use one or more nuclear weapons in theater to break the momentum of America’s successful conventional campaign to defend that island.

By the same token, it’s my understanding that Chinese thinkers generally assume that it would be the United States that is likely to “go first,” such as if we end up losing a conventional fight over Taiwan. In their view, Washington might well use nuclear weapons to blunt a Taiwan invasion PLA planners flatter themselves that we could not stop by other means – that is, as a last-ditch alternative to simply surrendering that island democracy to Communist absorption.

The strange thing, however, is that while each side thus assumes the other is the most likely to use nuclear weapons first, each still seems curiously in denial about the possibility that it might do so itself. 

Perhaps I’m missing out on some subset of present-day Western wargaming, for example, but I’ve not yet seen a U.S. game in which we initiate nuclear use. As for Chinese interlocutors with whom I speak from time to time at conferences, such is the ideological imperative of supporting CCP propaganda messaging about Beijing’s supposed nuclear “no first use” (NFU) policy that they profess themselves positively astonished by the idea that we actually think they would ever initiate use. This, they assure us – I think with personal sincerity, if not actually too much credibility – China would never do.

It thus feels a bit like we’re still living in a Sino-American strategic community that isn’t yet reckoning entirely honestly with the very real escalation pressures that could indeed arise out of regional conflict. We find it hard to think clearly about American first use in our gaming, and – at least in public, or when talking to Westerners, anyway – i seem to refuse to admit the possibility of Chinese first use.

If so, this is still a strategic community that isn’t yet doing the job it should be in thinking through how to handle the escalation management and coercive bargaining questions – and the first use incentives potentially going in either direction – that might well arise in real-world scenarios. 

We’ll have to do better than this if we’re to be equal to the challenges we face. And this is especially true now that it’s become so clear that America’s adversaries are explicitly planning to use what China calls “strategic counterbalance” to confront us with regional conflict scenarios that weaponize against us the weaker hand we hold in theater-class nuclear capabilities. I fear it’s time to open the conceptual aperture a bit.

-- Christopher Ford