China and Russia are reportedly both working on modernizing their nuclear program. Will they be working together against the United States?
China and Russia Working Together for a Nuclear Arsenal?
Beijing is getting ready to turn on a new reactor that the Pentagon believes would supply fuel for a significant increase in China's nuclear arsenal, potentially elevating it to the level of nuclear parity with the United States and Russia. The fast breeder reactor is excellent at producing plutonium, the primary fuel for atomic bombs.
Russia is providing the reactor's nuclear fuel, and its Rosatom nuclear power plant just finished delivering 25 tons of highly enriched uranium to begin production. With that agreement, Russia and China are working together on a project that will support their nuclear modernization efforts and, according to estimates from the Pentagon, result in arsenals that might be much larger than those of the United States, the New York Times reported.
China's expansion comes when Russia is deploying new weapons systems and threatening to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield against Ukraine. This is the most recent illustration of what American strategists believe to be a new, much more complex era than the country experienced during the Cold War.
Following their meeting in Moscow last month, Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir V. Putin of Russia inked an agreement extending their collaboration for many more years, if not decades.
According to a policy document released by the Pentagon last October, by the 2030s, the United States would face two major nuclear powers for the first time in its history as strategic rivals and potential enemies. This will significantly strain the country's stability and present new risk mitigation, assurance, deterrence, and arms control difficulties.
However, there is no proof that China and Russia are collaborating on nuclear weapons or a coordinated nuclear strategy to deal with their shared enemy, despite China's insistence that the breeder reactors on the coast will only be used for civilian purposes.
However, a senior Pentagon officer named John F. Plumb recently informed Congress that there is no escaping the reality that breeder reactors are made of plutonium, and that plutonium is used in weapons.
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China and US Have Deepening Tensions?
The belief that China must oppose "all-around containment," including a more potent nuclear deterrent, appears to have become firmer as tensions between Beijing and Washington have grown. Other indications that China is developing its nuclear weapons capability include reprocessing facilities for spent nuclear fuel, new reactors that don't seem part of the civilian power grid, and construction activity at the Lop Nor nuclear test site. This is true even among experts who think that China's breeder reactors face many technological obstacles.
The Chinese leadership is even more committed to long-term China-US competition, if necessary, confrontation, according to Tong Zhao, a senior scholar in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He added that China's nuclear development is primarily intended to change how the United States perceives the global balance of power and get it to acknowledge that China is poised to gain similar power.
According to M. Taylor Fravel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who studies China's military, China wants to dispel whatever uncertainty the United States may have about its deterrent.
China is also improving its "triad"-the three means of delivering nuclear weapons from the land, sea, and air-in a similar way that the US and the Soviet Union did during the Cold War to make their nuclear threats practically invulnerable.
In a speech, the Chinese leader told a Communist Party congress in October that his country must "establish a strong system of strategic deterrence."
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