The Next Big U.S.-China Military Challenge: Beijing's Underwater Nukes

If America can credibly threaten China's nuclear deterrent, Beijing’s paranoia might become more risk-acceptant, rather than less. However, the Cold War might offer some perspective. 

Robert Farley

November 14, 2015

The early post-war Soviet Navy lacked much in the way of serious anti-submarine capabilities.  However, during the 1960s the Soviets began to pursue ASW with much greater seriousness, introducing a variety of ASW specialized surface vessels and aircraft-carrying ships. China has yet to pursue ASW with the same degree of enthusiasm, although Chinese ASW has reportedly improved in the last decade.  Overall, however, the ability of the PLAN to protect its bastions is probably less than that of the Soviet Navy during its heyday.

By the 1970s the Soviets had deployed large numbers of bombers and ICBMs, easily capable of providing secure second strike capability. While a surprise U.S. attack might decapitate the Soviet leadership, the Americans could not hope to destroy the entire Soviet second strike capability on the ground. And while China’s nuclear forces have taken a step forward in the past decade, they do cannot yet match the robustness of Soviet nuclear forces in the latter part of the Cold War. Attacks on Chinese SSBNs would attrite the entire Chinese nuclear deterrent at a faster rate than the Soviet.

During the Cold War, the Soviet leadership exhibited spectacular paranoia about the prospect of a decapitating strike against the Kremlin. Various systems, including stealth aircraft and land-attack cruise missiles, threatened to detach the leadership from the broader Soviet military machine. The Chinese leadership, on the other hand, has accepted nuclear vulnerability for at least fifty years, relying instead on a minimal deterrent posture combined with the exploitation of superpower tension. Thus, we can hope that the CCP will react in measured fashion to the loss of its nuclear deterrent.

What of the effectiveness of USN attack submarines? U.S. SSNs have never stopped monitoring Russian SSBN deployments, but they have increasingly taken on other missions, such as the launch of land-attack cruise missiles. Modern Seawolf and Virginia class submarines surely exceed the capabilities of the boats deployed during the late Cold War, however.

Taken together, these factors suggest a strategic situation that differs in important ways from the late Cold War balance. Even protected by bastions, China’s boomers will suffer greater vulnerability than did their Soviet cousins.  At the same time, the Chinese leadership has historically accepted a greater degree of nuclear vulnerability than the Soviets entertained at any point past the 1950s. Consequently, there is some reason to hope that attacks against China’s boomer bastions would not result in nuclear escalation.