WASHINGTON — On the Chinese coast, about 220 kilometers from Taiwan, Beijing is preparing to start up a new reactor that the US Department of Defense believes will deliver fuel for a major expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal, which could make it in an atomic counterpart of the United States and Russia. The reactor, known as a fast breeder, excels in producing plutonium, an important fuel for atomic bombs.
Nuclear material for the reactor is being supplied by Russia, whose nuclear giant Rosatom recently completed delivery of 25 tons of highly enriched uranium to start production. That deal means Russia and China are cooperating on a project that will help their own nuclear modernizations and, according to US estimates, proit will produce arsenals whose combined size could dwarf that of the United States.
This new reality is prompting a broad rethinking of US nuclear strategy that few anticipated a dozen years ago, when President Barack Obama envisioned a world moving toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons. In stead of, The United States faces questions about how to handle a three-way nuclear rivalry, turning on its head much of the deterrence strategy that has prevented nuclear war.
China’s expansion, at a time when Russia is threatening to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, is just the latest example of what American strategists see as a new era, far more complex than the Cold War.
China insists that the new breeder reactors will be for civilian purposes, and there is no evidence that China and Russia are working together on weapons, or a coordinated nuclear strategy to deal with their common adversary.
But John F. Plumb, a senior US Defense Department official, told Congress recently: “There is no getting around the fact that breeder reactors are plutonium and plutonium is for weapons.”
In an announcement that went largely unnoticed when Chinese President Xi Jinping met President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow in March, Rosatom and the China Atomic Energy Authority signed an agreement to extend their cooperation for years, if not decades.
“By the 2030s, the United States will, for the first time in its history, face off against two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.”, the US Department of Defense said last fall in a policy document.
More recently, US officials have sounded almost fatalistic about limiting China’s actions. “There is probably nothing we can do to stop, slow, disrupt, prohibit or destroy China’s nuclear development program that they have envisioned for the next 10 to 20 years,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress. in March.
Putin’s failures on the battlefield are making him even more dependent on his nuclear arsenal. New START, the only remaining treaty limiting the size of US and Russian arsenals, runs out in about a thousand days, and there is little chance of a new treaty as the war in Ukraine continues.
China now has about 410 nuclear warheads, according to a survey by the Federation of American Scientists. The latest US Defense Department report on the Chinese military, published in November, said the number of warheads could rise to 1,000 by the end of the decade and to 1,500 around 2035, if current rates are maintained.
Underscoring the urgency of the problem, the US State Department convened a panel of experts and gave it 180 days to come up with recommendations.
Still, there are reasons to be wary of worst-case scenarios. China and Russia have a long history of mutual mistrust. And the US Department of Defense is no stranger to exaggerated threats, which can free up budgets. Recently, some experts have criticized his warnings.
“Even if they double or triple, we are watching this and we have the ability to react,” Jon B. Wolfsthal, a National Security Council nuclear official during the Obama administration, said of China and Russia.
Some Republicans have started talking about expanding the US nuclear arsenal after New START expires so that it can match a combined Russian-Chinese force. Others call it an overreaction.
“I think it’s crazy to think that we’ll be fighting two nuclear wars at the same time,” said Matthew Bunn, a Harvard University professor who tracks nuclear weapons.
Deepening tensions between Beijing and Washington appear to have hardened Xi’s judgment that China must counter “total containment” even with a stronger nuclear deterrent. In addition to the breeder reactors, there are other signs that the country is expanding its nuclear weapons potential: spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plants, new reactors that seem to have no role in the power grid, and construction activity at the test site. Lop Nor nuclear
China has also been building three vast missile silo fields in its barren northern reaches. In all, the fields could contain up to about 350 ICBMs, each potentially armed with multiple warheads.
In the past, China mainly stored its missiles separately from nuclear warheads, meaning Washington would have significant warning if Beijing were to consider an escalation and there would be time for diplomacy. The new missiles to be installed in the silos are more likely to be accompanied by their warheads, reducing the time it would take to launch them, said M. Taylor Fravel, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor who studies China’s military.
China is also upgrading its “triad”—the three ways to deliver nuclear weapons from land, sea, and air. For example, the Chinese navy is working on a new generation of missile-launching submarines, replacing current ones that are so noisy that US forces have no trouble tracking them.
American leaders fear that Xi could wield his new weapons in a conflict over Taiwan.
Putin is also working to improve his arsenal. Five years ago, he exhibited five new classes of nuclear weapons that he said could defeat the West in war, including one he called “invincible.” Only two of those weapon systems have advanced. Three others, including the “invincible” missile, are mired in delays, test failures and feasibility questions.
The Biden Administration has announced plans to manufacture the first new warhead for the US nuclear arsenal since the Cold War — an upgrade the White House said was long overdue for security reasons. The weapon, for submarine missiles, is part of an estimated $2 trillion renovation of US atomic bases, plants, bombers, submarines and land-based missiles.
Beijing and Moscow point to renewal as motivation for their own upgrades. Weapons controllers see a spiral of action and counteraction that threatens to increase the risk of miscalculation and war.
By: David E. Sanger, William J. Broad, and Chris Buckley
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6697523, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-04 21:00:09
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