EMILY FENG, HOST:
President Trump leaves for Beijing on Tuesday to make the first U.S. presidential visit to China in more than eight years. He and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to talk about trade, technology access and security issues because China has been bolstering its military and expanding its nuclear program. I wanted to find out why, which brought me back to the 1960s when China became a nuclear power...
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Our nation successfully explodes its second nuclear bomb in the sky over the western part of our country.
FENG: ...Developing a nuclear weapon against steep odds in its western desert. But the threat Beijing wanted to deter then was not the U.S.
HUI ZHANG: So China, they focus on the arsenal target Soviet Union.
FENG: It was the Soviet Union, says Hui Zhang who researches China's nuclear history at Harvard University.
ZHANG: In the past, when China take U.S., have a very good friendship, then no worry about whether China have really second threat evident (ph) with U.S.
FENG: Zhang says trust in U.S. restraint, however, started waning in 1999 during a NATO air campaign against the then-Yugoslavia. The U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, it says by mistake, killing three people. And then in 2002, the U.S. withdrew from an anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia, making Beijing nervous. But still, for years after China kept its nuclear arsenal tiny, at the minimal level its military thought was strategically necessary. Then in 2012...
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The new Chinese leader's revealed, led by president-in-waiting, Xi Jinping.
FENG: ...China's current leader, Xi Jinping, came to power, and he accelerated an ambitious military modernization campaign, including of China's nuclear capabilities.
PEI-SHIUE HSIEH: For the first time ever, the United States will have to simultaneously deal with two nuclear peer competitors.
FENG: Those being Russia and China, says Pei-Shiue Hsieh, a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, which is a think tank affiliated with Taiwan's defense ministry. He says for China's Xi Jinping, the final clincher was in 2018 when the U.S. National Defense Strategy for the first time designated China as the U.S.'s strategic competitor.
HSIEH: Washington gradually shed its old illusions about China and started treating it like the No. 1 threat to security.
FENG: And he says China under Xi Jinping also wanted to be a regional power that could stand up to the U.S.
HSIEH: And so that's why Beijing, especially Xi Jinping, feel the pressure needed to increase the nuclear stockpile.
FENG: Today, the Pentagon estimates Beijing's nuclear arsenal to be around 600 warheads. That's more than twice what it had a decade ago, but it's still small compared to the more than 5,000 warheads the U.S. and Russia each have. Chinese defense officials say they want to max out at about 1,000 warheads soon. But Beijing has focused not just on quantity, but also capability because it has been closely watching the U.S. build its nuclear capabilities. That's according to M. Taylor Fravel. He's a professor specializing in security studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
M TAYLOR FRAVEL: What they worried about was that the U.S. was developing what's known as conventional long-range strike weapons that could be used to attack China's nuclear forces.
FENG: Beijing thus feared such advanced U.S. non-nuclear weapons could take out most of its nuclear arsenal.
FRAVEL: Whatever few Chinese missiles might survive would then be mopped up by kind of U.S. missile defenses, and so essentially, China would have no means to retaliate.
FENG: Joseph Rodgers, who focuses on nuclear issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, notes Beijing is keeping up with the U.S. by developing land, air and sea launch capabilities.
JOSEPH RODGERS: So they have missiles that sit on the backs of trucks, and they can drive them into tunnels and move them around a lot. China is also fielding submarine launch ballistic missiles, so they have subs that have missiles on them. One other component of their land leg is these silos.
FENG: Silos - five years ago, satellite images revealed China had built missile silo fields where Beijing could bury missiles in the ground to be launched on short notice. It's part of Beijing's effort to create what nuclear experts call launch-on-warning abilities, the ability for China to fire back devastating nuclear missiles even before they're hit themselves. It's a powerful deterrent, but it's also a risky one, says hi in Taipei.
HSIEH: And this will dramatically shrink the window of decision-making and increase the risk of a nuclear war breaking out by miscalculation.
FENG: Matt Korda with the Federation of American Scientists discovered one of these silo fields, and he's been tracking them through satellite imaging. So far, he's been unable to confirm if China has loaded any of these fields with actual warheads. But the silo fields have been built out over the years, and Korda can see these Chinese nuclear sites in great detail.
MATT KORDA: You'll see this sort of - like, a silo hatch. You'll see a road that comes up to it that will allow for an easy loading process - right? - 'cause these trucks that are carrying these missiles are very big.
FENG: Up until 2024, Chinese state media said these were wind turbine fields, and private retired Chinese senior officials have tried to justify the silo field, saying Beijing must expand over fears the U.S. would hit them first, according to two former U.S. officials who requested anonymity, so they could speak candidly about these private discussions. And that also means China is making more nuclear weapons. This year, geospatial analyst Renny Babiarz discovered a new nuclear production facility in the mountains of southwestern Sichuan province.
RENNY BABIARZ: And that's the Zetong nuclear weapons complex. That's a complex of five areas that includes a road-to-rail transfer point.
FENG: And a testing area.
BABIARZ: So it's an area that tests high explosives that are a component of nuclear warheads.
FENG: China's nuclear expansion has been flagged repeatedly by the Pentagon, which has allocated more resources to deterring China. That may further prompt China to keep expanding its nuclear arsenal, a potentially escalatory cycle which Fravel at MIT says is a classic security dilemma.
FRAVEL: From the Chinese perspective, they saw the U.S. as more threatening. You know, from a U.S. perspective, they looked at China and its massive, you know, really rapid military modernization - began to view China as much more threatening.
FENG: And the tricky thing about security dilemmas, Fravel says, is they are much easier to slip into than to get out of. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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