Nuclear Issues

For true political and strategic stability in Southern Asia, China must be involved as a committed party to India-Pakistan confidence building measures, argues Frank O'Donnell in South Asian Voices' series, "Twenty Years Into Nuclear South Asia."

Some western scholars have expressed growing concern about China’s expansion of its nuclear arsenal and what they see as a “sprint to parity” with the United States. One scholar even claimed that China could have built as many as 3,000 nuclear weapons, far above the estimate of Western intelligence agencies, which assume that China has between 200 and 300. As a comparison, the United States and Russia each keep roughly 7,000 nuclear weapons. If China had any interest in parity, that would leave it with an awfully long way to go.

"Just as U.S. nuclear strategy and arsenal expansions affect those of China, China's nuclear shifts affect India's threat perceptions. Pakistan, in turn, pays close attention to any growth in Indian nuclear forces. To avoid a nuclear chain reaction in Asia, Congress should take a stand against proliferation and refuse to fund these new weapons programs."

In this essay, Hui Zhang reviews the status of spent fuel storage in China.  He suggest that China should take steps to improve physical protection, reduce insider threats, promote a nuclear security culture, and improve nuclear cyber security. He also recommends China, South Korea, and Japans’ nuclear security training centers should cooperate and exchange best practices on insider threat reduction, contingency plans for emergency response, and discuss regional cooperation for long-term spent fuel storage, including building a regional center of spent fuel storage.

In July, North Korea test fired a ballistic missile said to be capable of reaching the United States. Not surprisingly, Kim Jong-un’s provocations have been met with increased calls by congressional leadership and policymakers to ratchet up the pressure on China — North Korea’s lifeline to the international financial system, according to a recent UN report. A difficult question for policymakers now is how far should the United States go to increase pressure against China?

On April 25, 2017 China put on public display the Changzheng-1, its first Type 091 Han-class nuclear powered attack submarine. It entered service in 1974 and was decommissioned in 2013.

China launched its nuclear-powered submarine program in 1958, soon after starting its nuclear weapon program. To avoid the nuclear submarine program competing with the nuclear-weapon program for scarce HEU, according The Secret Course, an authoritative book on China's nuclear history, the decision was made to use LEU fuel for naval reactors.