Understanding Chinese Nuclear Thinking

The format is approximately 7 inches by 10 inches. viii, 273, [3] pages. Notes. Li Bin was a senior fellow working jointly in the Nuclear Policy Program and the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A physicist and expert on nuclear disarmament, his research focuses on China's nuclear and arms control policy and on U.S.-Chinese nuclear relations. Li is also a professor of international relations at Tsinghua University. He previously directed the arms control division at the Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, where he also served as executive director of the Program for Science and National Security Studies. Li was a Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Foundation Peace and Security Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University. In 1996, Li joined the Chinese delegation on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty negotiations. Li is the author of Arms Control Theories and Analysis and co-editor of Strategy and Security: A Technical View. He has also been published in numerous academic journals, including the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Arms Control Today, Jane's Intelligence Review, and Science & Global Security. Tong Zhao is a senior fellow with the Nuclear Policy Program and Carnegie China. Formerly based in Beijing, he now conducts research in Washington on strategic security issues, such as nuclear weapons policy, deterrence, arms control, nonproliferation, missile defense, hypersonic weapons, regional security issues in Asia Pacific, and China's security and foreign policy. Chinese and U.S. nuclear experts communicate regularly, but these exchanges often remain difficult and inefficient. Critical differences between Chinese and U.S. thinking about nuclear weapons and deterrence result not merely from differing security environments and levels of military strength; they also exist because China and the United States have developed their own nuclear philosophies in implementing their security policies over many years. A deeper understanding of these differences sheds light on the fundamental drivers of China's nuclear policies and how such policies may evolve in the future. Important strategic concepts have very different connotations among Chinese and U.S. experts, including nuclear deterrence, arms races, and strategic stability. Chinese analysts, for instance, consider nuclear deterrence and compellence to be indistinguishable in most cases, and thus often criticize the offensive implications of some U.S. nuclear deterrence policies. China's security paradigm emphasizes national security challenges deriving from vulnerability, particularly technical lagging, whereby another country masters a military technology that it has not. In many cases, China pursues military and nuclear development efforts simply to master new defense technologies, but not necessarily deploy them, so as to avoid technical lagging. China believes the ultimate goal of nuclear disarmament is completely eliminating all nuclear weapons and that the best way of achieving this is to first constrain their use. This informs how China prefers to approach nuclear disarmament. China's no-first-use policy for its nuclear weapons still serves its national security interests. Notwithstanding recent debates, the policy continues to effectively guide China's nuclear-weapon development and operations, and its nuclear-arms-control diplomacy. Chinese experts weigh both technical and political factors in their calculation of strategic stability. They especially worry about instability caused by technical lagging. To reduce the danger of nuclear war, Chinese analysts favor the maintenance of an effective firebreak between nuclear weapons and conventional conflict. China views nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism as growing national security challenges. Beijing emphasizes the importance of addressing the root causes of proliferation and supports greater international cooperative.…