China will “basically complete modernization” of its military capabilities by 2035, by which time it may have a stockpile of 1,500 nuclear warheads, the Pentagon said in a report released Tuesday.
The latest congressionally mandated “China Military Power” report covers developments through the end of 2021. In it, the Pentagon said that China likely accelerated its nuclear expansion efforts and now has more than 400 operational nuclear warheads: about double what the Defense Department thought Beijing had in 2020.
“Over the next decade, [China] aims to modernize, diversify, and expand its nuclear forces. Compared to the [People’s Liberation Army’s] (PLA) nuclear modernization efforts a decade ago, current efforts exceed previous modernization attempts in both scale and complexity,” according to the Pentagon report.
China has also continued building three solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silo fields, “which will cumulatively contain at least 300 new ICBM silos,” according to the report.
A Pentagon spokesperson told reporters Tuesday that the U.S. still hopes China will come to the table one day to talk about arms control.
“[W]e would want to ensure that from a global and regional stability standpoint that we can maintain an open dialogue to ensure there’s transparency and that we understand what the intent is behind this,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon’s press secretary, said during a media briefing.
Despite overtures from multiple U.S. presidents, China has been loath to discuss its nuclear weapons program with other countries and has said outright that it will not join any multilateral nuclear arms control treaty.
The U.S. had a stockpile of roughly 3,750 nuclear warheads as of September 2020, according to the most recent count provided by the State Department. Under the New START nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, the U.S. may deploy a maximum of 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads. As of September, the U.S. had 1,420 New START-accountable warheads deployed, according to State.
An unclassified version of the new National Defense Strategy released in late October detailed the “pacing challenge” of China as the Pentagon’s prime focus, despite a more “acute threat” presented by Russia. The strategy said China is “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security.”
A version of this story first appeared in Weapons Complex Morning Briefing affiliate publication Defense Daily.
