International security

China’s Happy to Sit Out the Nuclear Arms Race

For China, it’s not the size of the arsenal that counts, it’s how you use it. About 200 nuclear warheads are “enough.” China’s primary goal has always been to prevent the use of nuclear weapons against them. Beijing figured out that you don’t need 30,000 nuclear warheads to achieve that end — you only need enough that the risk of losing a major city in retaliation holds your opponents back. They have enough for escalation control, they have enough for deterrence, and they only need to mate their warheads to delivery vehicles to signal.

So they keep their strategic forces small and agile. With about 200 weapons, you already have increased the cost of nuclear war enough that nobody wants to start one with you. You don’t even have to spend a fortune to keep those weapons ready to go at a moment’s notice, as Russia and the United States do with their arsenals.