As the Middle East teeters on the brink of all-out war, and the conflict in Ukraine shows no sign of coming to an end, there is a third threat to global stability that troubles the minds of military planners in Whitehall and Washington: China’s rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal.
Next month, Keir Starmer’s government will publish its National Security Strategy, and alongside it, a long-planned “audit” on the UK’s relations with China.
While the National Security Strategy is expected to be stark on the threats facing the UK in 2025, some fear that the China audit will pull its punches due to the government’s desire to engage with Beijing to help economic growth and cooperate on tackling climate change.
The Labour administration, under Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy, tries to differentiate between Russia – branded as an “immediate and pressing threat” in the recent Strategic Defence Review – and China, which it sees as “a sophisticated and persistent challenge”.
Yet that same SDR spelled out just how rapid China’s nuclear proliferation is expected to be by the end of the decade.
By 2030, Beijing – a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – is predicted to double its number of nuclear warheads by 2030.
The SDR said that Beijing has instigated a “vast increase in advanced platforms and weapons systems, such as space warfare capabilities” as well as the “unprecedented diversification and growth of its conventional and nuclear missile forces, with missiles that can reach the UK and Europe”.
China has “more types and greater numbers of nuclear weapons than ever before, with its arsenal expected to double to 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030”.
It has also “embarked on large-scale, extraordinarily rapid military modernisation across its forces”, the SDR said.
This also includes a “vast increase in advanced platforms and weapons systems, such as space warfare capabilities”.
The review warned that “nuclear-armed states like Russia and China are putting nuclear weapons at the centre of their security strategies, increasing the number and types of weapons in their stockpiles”.
It added: “The coming decades will be defined by multiple and concurrent dilemmas, proliferating and disruptive technologies, and the erosion of international agreements and organisations that have previously helped to prevent conflict between nuclear powers.
“Strategic stability will be challenged, with new and more complex pathways to escalation that the UK and its allies will need to address. Allied assurance will become more complicated as others may be incentivised to develop nuclear weapons of their own.”
Bob Seely, an ex-military officer, former Conservative MP and author of The New Total War, said: “What’s clear is that China has been upgrading and updating its new nuclear arsenal across the board.
“This is all part of a significant uplift in Chinese hard power to align with its soft power and hybrid war tools and techniques ranging from economic manipulation to the belt and road scheme, through to repetitive daily cyber attacks and the use of AI against Taiwan and other targets.”
And Luke de Pulford of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China said: “Beijing is engaged in what the former foreign secretary called the ‘biggest military build up in history’.
“Against a background of ever-increasing grey zone activity around Taiwan and escalating aggression in the South and West Pacific and West Philippine Sea, we should all be deeply troubled by China’s expanding nuclear arsenal.”
Is Beijing’s ‘no first use’ of nukes policy in doubt?
Lukasz Kulesa, director of proliferation and nuclear policy at RUSI, said the advance of the Chinese nuclear programme since the end of the last decade was “quite unprecedented”.
He added: “For a very long time, China maintained its forces at pretty low levels, and it was always looking at them as a way to deter and respond based on their ‘no first use’ pledge to a nuclear attack. So the change has been pretty radical.”
Kulesa said China had been constructing three new big missile fields with silos for intercontinental and ballistic missiles, as well as a new generation of nuclear submarines, armed with nuclear ballistic missiles.
The number of nuclear warheads had increased from 200 in the late 2010s, to around 600 currently, Kulesa said, adding: “If that pace of development and building up the warhead stockpile is to be maintained, then this figure of reaching 1000 warheads by 2030 seems achievable.”
He said this military build-up appeared to be expanding Beijing’s options beyond a so-called second or retaliatory strike.
The Chinese doctrine was still “no first use”, Kulesa said, but “this increased nuclear arsenal will create options for the leadership”.
Beijing may want to expand its arsenal to allow it to have prestige as a global world power: “So the nuclear weapons might be seen as one of these attributes of a great power that China needs to step up to in order to be able to shape or to change the international system.”
The findings of the SDR were backed in full by Starmer and Defence Secretary John Healey. But ministers have a three-pronged approach to Beijing as part of its “strategic and pragmatic relationship with China, rooted in UK and global interests”, specifically: “cooperating where we can, competing where we need to, and challenging where we must”.
This does not mean the UK is ignoring the potential for a new conflict in a new theatre in the Indo-Pacific.
In fact, earlier this year a Royal Navy carrier strike group, which included the aircraft carrier the HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Dauntless, a Type 45 Destroyer, set sail for the Indo-Pacific.
It will carry out exercises in the region as a show of strength and support for allies like Japan and Australia.
But given many believe that China will attempt to blockade, or even invade, Taiwan by the end of the decade, or even sooner, the deployment is seen as a stepping up of British military presence in the region just in case.
Last month, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth warned invasion of Taiwan by China could in fact be imminent.
Healey was asked whether he agreed with his US counterpart in an interview with the BBC ahead of the publication of the SDR earlier this month.
The Defence Secretary said: “He was stating what everyone has recognised, which is that President Xi has put his own forces on a footing to be able to have the military strength if required.
“Our job alongside the US and other allies is to say to the Chinese – don’t pursue any of your purposes by military means. Don’t disrupt the regional security and stability.
“We can play a part in reinforcing that regional stability, for instance with the carrier that the UK is sending into the Indo-Pacific at this moment, or our alliance with Australia and with the US over new submarines for the future. We can play a part in reinforcing that regional security and stability and saying to China, pursue this, resolve this, by political and not by military means.”
But Seely said: “The UK is sadly not alive to the threat because we still do not see China as an adversary but as a challenge.
“We waited years before we saw Russia as the threat that it became. Yet again, we’re being too slow to respond and not thinking through strategy with our closest allies in Europe, America and the Pacific.
“Ultimately, the threat won’t come from nuclear but from conventional and the use of non-military forms of conflict – we are sadly ill-prepared for all these forms of conflict.”
What can the UK do?
Even though China has missiles that can reach the UK, experts believe that Beijing’s sights would not extend beyond the Indo-Pacific region.
Yet the British government is likely to press for greater cooperation between European Nato countries and its allies in the Indo-Pacific, such as Japan, Australia, and the US.
According to the SDR, this could include “leveraging the UK’s niche capabilities and overseas bases” – including the one at Diego Garcia – as well as “building collective defence industrial capacity” and “strengthening regional partners and protecting freedom of navigation”.
Crucially, the UK wants to maintain its “pragmatic” relationship with Beijing in case a crisis erupts.
The SDR said the British government should “maintain military-to-military channels of communication with China to deepen mutual understanding and avoid miscalculation and inadvertent escalation in the event of a crisis”.
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