Good afternoon, everyone!  I’m very pleased to be able to participate in this dialogue, and am grateful to the Pacific Forum for organizing it and to the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency for its sponsorship.  I will be speaking today only for myself, of course, and not for the MITRE Corporation or the Hoover Institution.  Nevertheless, I’m glad to be able to offer some thoughts for this panel on “The WMD Challenge: Regional Maritime Security Implications of Nuclear Weapons and Missile Technology Developments.”

In case some of you are wondering what nuclear weapons have to do with maritime security in this area of the world, I hope I can make clear how the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) enormous nuclear weapons build-up is an integral part of what is emerging as an equally enormous maritime security threat to the nations of Southeast Asia. 

The key to understanding the connection between the PRC’s nuclear build-up and threats to China’s neighbors lies in remembering the way in which Vladimir Putin has been trying to use the existence of Russia’s nuclear arsenal – and threats to use it – to deter direct U.S. and allied opposition to his campaign to invade and annex his own neighbors. 

Before I amplify that point, however, let me first briefly outline the nature and scale of the Chinese nuclear weapons buildup. 

As the Biden Administration’s recently-released Nuclear Posture Review notes, China “has embarked on an ambitious expansion, modernization, and diversification of its nuclear forces.”  According to the much-delayed but now released 2022 Report to Congress on Chinese military power from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), China is “investing in and expanding the number of its land-, sea-, and air-based nuclear delivery platforms and constructing the infrastructure necessary to support this expansion by increasing its capability to produce and separate plutonium by constructing fast breeder reactors and reprocessing facilities.”  This is depressingly consistent with the recently-released U.S. National Defense Strategy (NDS), which observed that “[t]he range of nuclear options available to the PRC leadership will expand in the years ahead,” and China has “plans for expanding fissile material production to support its growing arsenal.” 

According to the new 2022 Report, “[i]f China continues the pace of its nuclear expansion, it will likely field a stockpile of about 1500 warheads” by 2035.  This is a remarkable figure, especially if you consider that the legal limit on U.S. operationally deployed nuclear warheads under the New START agreement is 1,550, and that as of September 2022, the U.S. is currently at only 1,420 such warheads under New START counting rules.  This makes it sound as if China is sprinting at least for parity, and perhaps for nuclear superiority.

Moreover, China’s nuclear build-up continues to accelerate.   According to the DoD’s 2021 Report, the PRC’s nuclear expansion then “exceed[ed] the pace and size the DoD projected in 2020.”  According to the new 2022 Report, it “probably accelerated” this expansion further in 2021.  China’s pace of nuclear weapons expansion seems to be picking up every year.  Even in 2021, the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command admitted that the size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal might even “triple or quadruple … over the next decade” – an estimate thereafter endorsed by the head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

In late 2021, it was also revealed that China was constructing at least 300 new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos – an extraordinary number to be building all at once – and this is now confirmed officially by the 2022 DoD Report, which says “over 300” silos are now being built that will be capable of launching either China’s Dong Feng-31 (DF-31) or Dong Feng-41 (DF-41) missile.  It’s worth noting, furthermore, that the DF-41 is reported to be capable of carrying as many as 10 warheads each.  The DoD’s 2022 Report says that it is “likely intended” to be deployed with only three warheads each, but even at that lower figure that would amount to more than 900 new strategic warheads, with a formidable additional upload capability should China decide to put more warheads on them in a sprint to superiority.

Nor is that even the total number of new silos China is building.  According to the DoD’s 2022 Report, it is also constructing new silos for Dong Feng-5 (DF-5) strategic missiles.

As the DoD’s 2022 Report notes, “Beijing has not declared an end goal nor acknowledged the scale of its expansion.”

These figures are alarming indeed, and they don’t even count China’s new ALBM that the U.S. DoD says in its 2022 Report “may be nuclear capable.”  More significantly still, they don’t count the new type of missile that is expected to be deployed on the PRC’s new Type 096 ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) that the 2022 Report says are expected to begin construction in the “early-2020s.”  According to the DoD’s 2021 Report, between existing Type 094 and next-generation Type 096 SSBNs, China “could have up to eight SSBNs [in service] by 2030.” By other estimates, in fact, the figure could actually be 10 rather than eight.  The DoD’s 2022 Report apparently doesn’t even hazard a guess now. 

According the 2022 Report, moreover, China is also apparently developing hypersonic missiles and a Fractional Orbit Bombardment System (FOBS) for nuclear weapons delivery, as well as a range of lower-yield nuclear weapons, and a stealth bomber.  And it is moving its nuclear force toward a launch-on-warning (LOW) posture as well.  China is, in sum, developing a highly “diverse nuclear force, comprised of systems ranging from lower-yield precision-strike missiles to ICBMs with multi-megaton yields.”

So fast and intense is China’s nuclear buildup, in fact, that the head of the U.S. Strategic Command has described U.S. nuclear deterrence vis-à-vis China as being a “ship” that “is slowly sinking” because “they are putting capability in the field faster than we are.”  Nor is this merely a theoretical or long-term challenge: as he noted, this is actually “a very near-term problem.”

And what is a near-term problem for U.S. military commanders charged with deterring Chinese aggression is necessarily also a problem for the states of Southeast Asia – especially since, as the DoD’s 2022 Report suggests, China may intend to use the South China Sea as a “bastion” for strategic nuclear forces in the form of Type 096 SSBNs with new JL-3 missiles.

I’ve been warning for years that a revisionist great power armed with nuclear weapons might try to use those weapons as a sort of “offensive nuclear umbrella” to provide “geostrategic ‘cover’ under which naked territorial aggression” could be attempted.  Such an umbrella, in other words, might allow a geopolitical predator to attack a small non-nuclear armed neighbor and rely upon the threat of nuclear weapons use to deter other major powers from intervening to protect the victim.

This is exactly what Vladimir Putin has already done once with Georgia and twice with Ukraine.  As the Biden Administration’s NPR notes, the Russians have been using their nuclear arsenal as “a shield behind which to wage unjustified aggression against their neighbors.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin put it more pithily, but quite clearly, in referring recently to Putin’s assumption that nuclear weapons give him a “hunting license” for aggression against non-nuclear-armed adversaries.

Nor is such nuclear-enabled predation likely to remain a Russian monopoly.  I suspect that this is exactly what Xi Jinping and the rest of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have in mind for the PRC’s current nuclear buildup.  As noted by the Biden Administration’s NDS, the PRC is using “increasingly coercive actions to reshape the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to its authoritarian preferences” and thereby “endanger the political autonomy of states” there.  As the CCP works to undermine the sovereignty and autonomy of states in this region by gradually building a new Sinocentric order in which everyone must defer to Beijing and follow the Party’s guidance on the issues of greatest importance, Beijing’s huge nuclear weapons buildup aims to convince powers such as the United States that the would-be Chinese hegemon must be left alone to cow and intimidate its neighbors without outside intervention.

China’s huge nuclear buildup, therefore, must not be viewed in isolation, or as something that relates “only” to high-level Sino-American problems not connected to the challenges of Southeast Asian regional security.  In actuality, that buildup is part of a broad system of Chinese tools for shaping the cost/benefit calculations of other states – what one might call a “leverage web” of coercive power – to incentivize other states to accept Chinese hegemony and take their assigned places as tributary states to a China that has achieved what the CCP terms China’s “national rejuvenation” as the dominant global power. 

So what would China do in the Indo-Pacific if it succeeds in using its nuclear forces to create tactical “space” in which to have its way with neighbors such as Japan and the Philippines?  I think history may offer us some clues.

At the beginning of the 15^th Century, in the very first years of the Ming Empire after the Mongol invader dynasty of the Yuan had fallen, the famous Admiral Zheng He led a series of “treasure fleet” voyages from China that ranged all the way from Southeast Asia to the eastern coast of Africa.  Chinese diplomats sometimes point to Zheng He in claiming that nobody should be worried by China’s rise to power and influence in the world, arguing that his voyages show that even a China with preeminent naval power projection capabilities will only use them for “win-win” engagements with other peoples, and that China will never engage in imperialism.

The problem with such supposed historical lessons, however, is that they actually aren’t historical lessons. 

According to contemporary records, there wasn’t anything congenially “win-win” about Zheng He at all.  His famous voyages, in fact, seem to have been primarily dedicated to overawing other states with China’s military might and civilizational strength, demanding that they demonstrate their deference and subservience to China.  When states sometimes tried to assert their independence and autonomy by refusing to kowtow to China, in fact, Zheng He acted very much the imperialist. 

Zheng He’s forces, for instance, invaded Sri Lanka to capture a local ruler who had offended China, bringing that man back to the Ming Court in chains.  (Adding arrogant cultural and religious insult to this injury, his forces also stole a famous Buddhist relic and took it to China as booty.  It was not returned until the 20^th Century.)  The Chinese admiral also intervened in a civil war in northern Sumatra in support of a local chieftain sympathetic to the Ming against one who wasn’t, also establishing a Chinese colony there. 

Zheng He’s voyages were, in other words, all about asserting and enforcing Chinese hegemony.  They were peaceful only if, and to the extent that, local rulers accepted the role China assigned them as tributaries of the Ming Empire.  And they were also – as Sumatra illustrates – literally efforts at Chinese colonialist expansion.

In a sense, therefore, I suspect Chinese officials are right to invoke Zheng He as a symbol of what China is likely to do with modern global power, though they would like us to forget what actually happened in the 15^th Century because history signals that China’s ancient instincts vis-à-vis its neighbors are absolutely imperial and domineering.  I would like to suggest that Zheng He offers a model of what we should expect from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) under the “offensive nuclear umbrella” of Xi Jinping’s massive nuclear buildup.

Make no mistake: the PLA seems to be preparing itself quite well for a role of intimidating China’s regional neighbors into Sinocentric submission.  According to the U.S. DoD’s 2022 Report on Chinese military power, the PLA Navy (PLAN) now has “numerically the largest navy in the world with an overall battle force of approximately 340 ships and submarines, including approximately more than 125 major surface combatants.”  It also increasingly has “the ability to conduct long-range precision strikes against land targets from its submarine and surface combatants using land-attack cruise missiles, notably enhancing the PRC’s power projection capability.”  Chinese military aviation assets, moreover, are working to develop themselves into “a truly ‘strategic’ air force, able to project power at long distances and advance and defend the PRC’s global interests.”   

In terms of regional power projection, the 2022 DoD report notes that the PRC’s “outposts in the South China Sea extend[] the possible operating areas of PLA aviation forces,” and outposts such as the Spratly Islands have been equipped with advanced anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile systems and military jamming equipment.”  These outposts are “capable of supporting military operations” and “include advanced weapons systems.”  The PRC has added more than 3,200 acres of land to seven features it occupies in the Spratlys, providing “airfields, berthing areas, and resupply facilities that allow the PRC to maintain a flexible and persistent military and paramilitary presence in the area.”

China is also building out a fleet of aircraft carriers.  Having commissioned its first domestically-produced carrier in 2019, China will likely have a second enter service in 2024, and began constructing a new one in 2018.  By some accounts, in fact, China could have five carriers in service by 2030.

Zheng He did just fine intimidating China’s neighbors and enforcing Ming dynastic hegemony over other regional peoples with his huge fleets of large wooden ships and embarked infantry between 1405 and 1433, which completely outclassed the forces available to anyone else in the Indo-Pacific at that time.   The PLA seems to want an equivalent toolkit for the mid-21^st Century, and countries such as Japan and the Philippines are clearly the targets – while Beijing hopes to persuade U.S. forces to remain disengaged through threats of nuclear escalation, just as Putin now hopes will remain the case in Ukraine.

Fortunately, I don’t think it has to be this way.  The shrill excesses of “wolf warrior” diplomacy under Xi Jinping have quite effectively signaled what the CCP really has in mind for the region despite decades of propaganda and disinformation about “win-win” opportunities and China’s supposedly benign intentions.  And Russia’s catastrophic recent problems in coping with Western-armed Ukrainian forces offer an encouraging example suggesting that it’s not quite so easy to browbeat and subjugate a smaller neighbor when that neighbor has highly-motivated and decently-equipped forces. 

The answer to Southeast Asia’s “China challenge,” therefore, is at least twofold.  First, it is essential to ensure that the countries of Southeast Asia are indeed motivated to resist Chinese imperialism and reject incorporation into the CCP’s Sinocentric hegemony.  Second, it will be essential to ensure that the countries of this region are properly equipped to resist, becoming “hard” enough “targets” for Sinic imperialism that Beijing will be disinclined to move against them.

With respect to the first factor, the challenge is political and diplomatic.  And as I outlined in Indonesia last summer, I think there is much scope for what is in effect anti-imperialist cooperation to protect the sovereignty and political autonomy of states in the Indo-Pacific against domination by a CCP-ruled Chinese dictatorship with hegemonic regional ambitions.  I realize that it may sound a bit funny for Americans and Japanese to urge anti-imperialist cooperation upon Filipinos, given the challenging history our three peoples have had with each other over the generations here in the Philippines.

Nevertheless, the world is as it is, and in fact the states of the Indo-Pacific do face a new challenge of imperialist aggression and coercion from China.  We shouldn’t be shy about calling it by its name.  In response to that challenge – and the imperative of protecting the precious sovereignty and autonomy of the peoples of this region – I believe that there is much we can do to build a “latticework” of regional relationships that will complicate and ultimately frustrate Beijing’s hegemonic regional ambitions.

It is both true and critical to be clear about the fact that even though Washington and Beijing clearly are in an increasingly problematic situation of strategic competition, this is not some kind of Sino-American “competition” for control of the Indo-Pacific.  Far from it.  It’s a competition to determine whether the existing free and open international order can survive the challenge it faces from China’s ambitious agenda of regional and global Sinocentrism.  It’s about preventing anyone from having control over sovereign peoples here: it’s about morality and national sovereignty, and about resisting imperialist aggression.

The countries of the region, working together with the United States, thus have a genuine opportunity to build a genuinely anti-imperialist campaign, grounding our efforts in the moral imperative of protecting the political autonomy of sovereign peoples against Chinese regional hegemony.  In defending the rights of regional states against Chinese encroachments, we will have both morality and international law on our side – not least as a result of the Philippines’ remarkable success in essentially “run[ning] the table” against the PRC in the South China Sea legal arbitration case.

With respect to the second factor – military capabilities – I also think there is much we can do together.  Even back when I was in government two or three years ago, we began to be more flexible in transferring advanced technologies to countries that could use them against revisionist great power threats. 

When I was performing the duties of the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, for instance, we were willing to transfer a remarkable array of advanced weapons systems to Taiwan to help make it more militarily “indigestible” to PLA forces that clearly wish to invade and subjugate that vibrant democracy.  In that role, I agreed to the transfer to Taiwan of advanced heavy torpedoes, Patriot missile systems, standoff land-attack missiles, High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers and Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missiles, Harpoon anti-ship missiles, and “weapons-ready” MQ-9 Reaper drones.  Since then, under the Biden Administration, U.S. transfers have continued, including more Patriot missile support, guided artillery rounds, and Harpoon missiles.

For my part, I see no reason that more arms transfer flexibility cannot also be possible as the United States works with other partners in the region – including specifically those most threatened by China’s occupation and garrisoning of the South China Sea in violation of international law, such as the Philippines.  With respect to allies such as Japan which already enjoy the benefit of high-end industrial and technological capabilities, moreover, there is also likely more that can be done by way of the co-development and co-production of advanced military systems. 

Working together, we can help confront China with the same sort of “anti-access/area denial” (A2/AD) problems in Southeast Asia and the East China Sea that the PRC seeks to present to U.S. military planners in the Taiwan Strait.  Zheng He didn’t have to deal with that, but we can ensure that China does! 

I don’t want to belabor the comparison, of course, but what if Portuguese sailors had been a generation or so faster working their way around the Cape of Good Hope in the 15^th Century, and had been on hand to provide European cannon to that hapless Sri Lankan leader who offended Zheng He by not showing sufficient deference to the Ming Dynasty?  Perhaps he wouldn’t have been hauled back to China in chains, and perhaps Zheng He would have had to decree an early stop to his voyages of Sinocentric intimidation.  Perhaps we can arrange to stymie Beijing’s modern intimidation project in analogous ways.

I’ll admit that having to do all this in the face of Chinese regional self-aggrandizement is unwelcome and unfortunate.  But that’s China’s choice, not ours.  In the face of the PRC’s dangerous and provocative regional ambitions, the states of the Indo-Pacific have a choice: they can bend the knee to the CCP’s modern Zheng He, or they can work together to protect their own sovereignty and autonomy.  I hope they choose the latter, and that my own country will remain both willing and able to help.

Thank you.

-- Christopher Ford