In five months, America will elect its next President. Not surprisingly, both leading candidates, through their lieutenants, are already floating what they would do to counter the rising military threats China, Russia, and their proxies now pose. They are both spotlighting the possibility of expanding America’s nuclear arsenal — the primary strategic lever Washington used to win the Cold War 35 years ago.
Whatever the merits of a quick nuclear ramp-up might be, neither camp has yet adequately described what the full requirements of a long-term strategic contest with Russia, China, and their proxies will entail. That’s unfortunate, as it will surely require far more than what any adjustment of our nuclear arsenal numbers could afford.
How much more is laid out in the attached — an NPEC monograph, China, Russia, and the Coming Cool War.
It consists of four chapters.
The first sketches out what a long-term contest with China, Russia, and its proxies will demand. Although building up military might and using threats of massive destruction against our enemies were critical to winning the Cold War, in the coming cool contest, they will no longer serve as our top ace in the hole. Instead, the key levers will be keeping our key military, political, and commercial functions immune to attacks and communicating, protecting, sharing, and analyzing essential information on an unprecedented scale. Wars may be waged against nations but the aim increasingly will be to disable them without physically obliterating them.
What, though, should we do about the growing nuclear threat? That’s the focus of the volume’s next chapter, “Xi and Putin Are Building More Nukes: How to Compete.” It, in turn, is followed by “What Missile-driven Competition with China Will Look Like,” which was first released three years ago. The Pentagon recently confirmed this essay’s predictions about China’s development of intercontinental conventional missiles by 2030. The essay’s other forecasts and military and diplomatic proposals are still timely.
This brings us to the volume’s last chapter, “Can Self-Government Survive the Next Convulsion?” It examines the domestic political, economic, and social implications of pursuing this volume’s recommendations. What’s needed most is a geographic distribution of America’s critical military and financial infrastructure and demographic capital. Fortunately, this has already begun, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, and aligns with America’s bent to spread and increase political power and wealth domestically.
The volume’s final section is an appendix consisting of an introduction Thomas Cochran and I co-authored for “China’s Civil Nuclear Sector: Plowshares to Swords?” — a three-year NPEC study of China’s nuclear weapons production potential. The Pentagon has cited this research in each of its annual Chinese military power assessments for the last three years running. The Pentagon has used the study to help explain why China is likely to acquire as many nuclear weapons in a decade as the United States currently has deployed. It was this projection, perhaps more than any other, that caused national security analysts to focus on what is likely to be a long-term strategic contest with China and its new ally, Russia.
China, Russia, and the Coming Cool War
Henry Sokolski
June 2024
Three years after the media released photos revealing China’s construction of hundreds of new intercontinental ballistic missile silos, even the most ardent of arms controllers find themselves resigned to the emergence of a major strategic rivalry with Beijing. The Ukraine war has only compounded this perception. Now, not only is Putin building up his arsenal with an array of new types of strategic weapons; he has also threatened to use these weapons against Ukraine and NATO nations.
This occasional paper is designed to clarify the character of this strategic rivalry and how the United States and its allies might prevail without bleeding in a major war.
The monograph consists of four chapters and an appendix. The first chapter, “Winning the Coming Cool War,” describes what America and its closest allies must do over several decades to prevail in a “cool war” in which collective analysis sharing and the securing of information will be far more important to secure victory than credibly threatening massive destruction with nuclear or conventional weapons.
The scope of the volume’s second chapter, “Xi and Putin Are Building More Nukes: How to Compete,” is more tactical. This chapter focuses on the nuclear challenge China and Russia will pose over the next ten to twenty years and what diplomatic and military action America and its allies should take to address it. Increasing allied demands for Washington to forward deploy its nuclear weapons overseas and Chinese and Russian objections to the same will be key considerations.
While the third chapter, “What a Missile-Driven Competition with China Will Look Like,” was published some time ago, it is still worth reading. It contends that the Chinese missile threat to the continental United States will become nonnuclear within the next decade. The Pentagon flagged this transition publicly for the first time late in 2023. This chapter clarifies the military and diplomatic implications of that and other strategic missile threats.
This leads to the volume’s final chapter, “Can Self-Government Survive the Next Convulsion?” It clarifies how American domestic affairs could adapt to help fend off emerging Russian and Chinese strategic threats. A central concept here is distributing America’s key political, corporate, demographic, industrial, and military assets and deploying secure communications to make this possible.
The volume’s final section is an appendix consisting of the introductory chapter of a three-year study NPEC released back in 2021. “China’s Civil Nuclear Sector: Plowshares to Swords?” was co-authored with Thomas Cochran. The Pentagon has cited this study in every one of its annual Chinese military power assessments since 2021. They use it to help explain why China is likely to have nearly as many nuclear weapons by the end of this decade as the United States currently has deployed. It was this projection, perhaps more than any other, that caused national security analysts to focus on what is likely to be a long-term strategic contest with China. It will be a major worry for at least the next decade.
To read the full occasional paper, click here.