Speaker
Description
How does China’s nuclear modernization affect U.S. nuclear strategy? What are the crisis bargaining and crisis stability implications of the emerging nuclear balance between the United States and China? How might the nuclear balance evolve over time? This paper addresses these questions. I argue that by building more hardened targets, China is imposing a damage-limitation tradeoff on the United States. In addition, the deployment pattern of China’s intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos, the growth of its air defense and counterspace capabilities, the adaptations of its mobile ICBM force, and the development of countermeasures against U.S. ballistic missile defenses are imposing damage-limitation uncertainty.
Achieving meaningful damage-limitation is possible, but it depends on making optimistic assumptions about variables whose value will be difficult to know prior to a counterforce operation and that are likely to grow worse over the course of a conventional war. Plus, even if the United States achieves meaningful damage-limitation, it would leave itself vulnerable to Russia’s nuclear forces. This state of the strategic nuclear balance between the United States and China should reduce the crisis bargaining benefits of pursuing a meaningful damage-limitation capability while preserving the potentially escalatory dynamics of such a pursuit. It will also generate an intense cross-domain nuclear arms race in which it will be difficult for the United States to escape a condition of damage-limitation uncertainty despite technological advancements in weapons accuracy and remote sensing of mobile nuclear platforms. More broadly, this research indicates that a state of mutually assured destruction (MAD) will be difficult to sustain, but a condition of damage-limitation uncertainty is potentially durable.
| If you are submitting an Open Panel proposal, have you included all four abstracts in attachment? | Yes, I have included all required information (see below). |
|---|---|
| Would you like to be considered for travel funding through the NetSec COST Action? | No |
| Are you a member of the NetSec Management Committee? | No |
| What discipline or branch of humanities or social sciences do you identify yourself with? | Political Science, International Relations |
| Which of the following best describes your stage of the career? | Assistant Professor |
| In which country is your home institution? | United States |
| What is your gender? | Male |