China’s Nuclear Weapons Buildup Driven by Unrestricted Warfare Doctrine, Experts Say
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In recent years, the Chinese military has sharply increased the size and capabilities of its nuclear arsenal, acquiring a broader range of missiles and delivery systems for what was once a relatively limited strategic deterrent force.
Some observers believe that by expanding its nuclear capabilities, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to strengthen its geopolitical position in Asia and beyond.
Communist China has surpassed 600 operational nuclear warheads and is set to grow that number to more than 1,000 by 2030, according to an annual Pentagon assessment published in December 2024. This is up from the estimated 300 warheads deployed by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) at the beginning of this decade.
Beijing is building hundreds of new missile silos, fielding a variety of improved strategic and tactical missiles, and testing fractional orbital bombardment systems, a type of space-based nuclear weapon with an effectively unlimited range. The PLA navy now operates six of the Type 094 class ballistic missile-carrying nuclear submarines, and has the more advanced Type 096 class under development, according to the Pentagon.
From Minimal Deterrence to Active Nuclear Strategy
The Chinese arsenal remains far behind U.S. and Russian stockpiles, which together amount to about 8,000 operational nuclear warheads. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, about 1,770 U.S. weapons have been deployed since the beginning of 2025, the vast majority of them being strategic warheads.Russia has about 1,700 strategic warheads deployed. Both Russia and the United States maintain much smaller numbers of tactical nuclear weapons for rapid use, while keeping thousands of warheads in reserve.
Strategic nuclear weapons are designed for long-range strikes to cause massive destruction of cities, infrastructure, or command centers.
Tactical nuclear weapons, by contrast, are intended for use on the battlefield against military targets such as troops, bases, and ships. They are typically shorter-ranged and have less sheer destructive power.
Researchers with the Taiwanese government-run Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR) said Beijing’s nuclear buildup indicates a shift in strategy by the CCP to view nuclear weapons as a means of augmenting Chinese conventional military strength.
Chung Chih-tung, assistant research fellow at INDSR, told The Epoch Times that previously, the Chinese regime had disregarded the deployment of nuclear weapons as a rational instrument. Maintaining a smaller force of ballistic missiles to guarantee retaliation in the event of a first strike by another power was deemed sufficient.
But China’s moves to expand and enhance its tactical arsenal while also bolstering its strategic forces indicate that “the CCP has now abandoned its strategy of minimum nuclear deterrence,” Chung said.
The Hudson Institute report states that although the CCP may not believe that it can win a nuclear war should one occur, China’s buildup indicates that the regime “wants to create political and psychological effects that lead to enormously important strategic and military effects.”
“The CCP and PLA are using the rapid development of nuclear capability and related delivery systems to subdue the adversary and win without fighting,” the report reads.
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Nuclear Weapons, Political Warfare
As part of sweeping military reforms rolled out at the end of 2015, Chinese leader Xi Jinping elevated the Second Artillery Corps—as the PLA’s nuclear forces were then known—to a separate military branch and renamed it the Rocket Force, giving it the mission of enhancing China’s “strategic counterstrike capabilities.”Xi also immediately began increasing research, investment, and development in nuclear weapons across land, sea, and underwater domains.
Su Tzu-yun, head of INDSR’s Division of Defense Strategy and Resources, told The Epoch Times that the CCP seems to be expanding its nuclear arsenal with the intent of reaching parity with the United States and, in so doing, is brandishing these weapons as a form of “political denial.”
Su said Russia, although militarily far weaker than the United States or its NATO allies, periodically threatens nuclear escalation, which he said has effectively prevented NATO’s direct intervention in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Hudson Institute’s report states that “China’s nuclear doctrine and nuclear warfighting approach are notoriously opaque and deliberately ambiguous” but that under Xi, the CCP has emphasized military strength as a means of asserting Beijing’s goals and objectives in international relations.
In particular, the Party “has long viewed the US as its primary and inevitable rival, even when the US pursued relatively benign policies toward it,” such as in the 1990s and 2000s, the report states.
For the CCP, the report reads, “a stable and amicable US–China relationship is possible only if the US accepts the legitimacy of the Chinese political system and state-led political economy and respects China’s so-called core interests,” including its territorial claims to Taiwan and large swaths of the South China Sea.
Su said communist China has always emphasized “constant struggle” with its adversaries, with rhetoric such as “abandoning illusions and preparing for war” featuring heavily in its political doctrine.
Central to the CCP’s geostrategic doctrine is its embrace of unrestricted warfare, in which the concepts of war or military action are taken to be broad and flexible.
Apart from direct military force, other domains in unrestricted warfare include political warfare targeting enemy governments and institutions, as well as psychological warfare aimed at influencing Beijing’s adversaries and target populations to the CCP’s benefit.
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Manipulating ‘Cognitive Functions’ to Impose Beijing’s Narratives
Chung said that once nuclear weapons are in the equation, nuclear conflict, or the prospect of it, becomes an important factor in the psychological confrontation between nuclear-armed states.The Hudson Institute report states that “many Chinese military texts on psychological warfare refer specifically to technologies and methods to manipulate or control the adversary’s cognitive functions.”
Part of the CCP’s approach to mastering the “cognitive domain” is its “consistent, coherent, and relentless” efforts to propagate and reinforce grand narratives about the inevitability of China’s rise, its military power, and the unshakable will of the communist regime to achieve its “expanding list of core objectives,” the report reads.
China’s nuclear modernization boosts the credibility of the CCP’s threats, and hence its ability to craft and manipulate the “cognitive functions” of its enemies and neighbors, particularly U.S. allies such as Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Australia.
Prevailing in the cognitive domain could prove crucial in potential conflicts over the South China Sea or in an invasion of Taiwan, the democratically governed de facto island country that Beijing claims as part of mainland China.
Governments that believe that Beijing is willing to use tactical or strategic nuclear weapons in a war over Taiwan could be deterred from coming to its aid or assisting a U.S. intervention in the event of such a conflict, the Hudson Institute report states.
In contrast to Russia, which openly warns about the possibility of nuclear escalation if Moscow’s boundaries are crossed, “the fundamental basis of the Chinese approach is to amplify uncertainty through its opaque and unexplained but self-evident rapid nuclear modernization,” the report reads.
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Pushing Back Against Nuclear Blackmail
The Hudson Institute report and INDSR experts recommend a combination of approaches to counter the CCP’s nuclear expansion and the strategies that are likely driving it.Su said he believes that the United States would be well-served by reflecting on the Cold War paradigm, wherein Washington confronted the Soviet Union’s conventional and nuclear military power by maintaining superior capabilities of its own and deploying them as necessary to demonstrate the credibility of U.S. military strength.
Chung said the United States must emphasize the shared democratic values among its Asian allies and do more to criticize the CCP’s authoritarian regime. At the same time, he said, the Trump administration should leverage its economic might to distance China and Russia.
According to the Hudson Institute report, China’s lack of a transparent and openly stated nuclear weapons doctrine—and the uncertainty it entails—means that arms control talks, such as those between the U.S. and Soviet governments at the end of the Cold War, are likely to be fruitless.
Instead, the report states, Washington should abandon “the false hope of arms control” and “accept ambiguity and strategic instability” in its dealings with Beijing.
At the same time, the report states, the United States should meet the CCP’s nuclear expansion and possible threats by encouraging U.S. allies throughout the Indo-Pacific region to bolster their own conventional armed forces while guaranteeing “extended nuclear deterrence” to cover them against Chinese nuclear attack.
This, according to the report, would counter Beijing’s attempts to erode U.S. allies’ confidence in the ability and willingness of Washington to act in the face of CCP threats.
“As China speeds ahead with nuclear modernization, the US and its allies need to persuade Beijing that doing so only accelerates US and allied conventional rearmament, which makes a successful Chinese military victory over Taiwan even less likely and more costly,” the report reads.
It warns against allowing or encouraging U.S. allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia to develop their own nuclear weapons, as this would “play into Chinese hands.” Any country that produces nuclear weapons of its own would diminish the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent, while at the same time being unable to match the actual nuclear capabilities of either Washington or Beijing. The CCP could thus single out those countries to threaten on an individual basis, the report argues.
Chung believes that U.S. President Donald Trump’s actions demonstrate his attitude toward handling the nuclear-armed adversaries of the United States.
In late July, Dmitry Medvedev, who served as Russian president from 2008 to 2012, made remarks warning the United States against issuing ultimatums to Moscow in peace talks regarding the Ukraine war.
Chung said Trump’s response demonstrated his confidence in U.S. economic and military strength.
“A realist like Trump will not be intimidated,” he said. “In fact, the more he is threatened, the stronger his response will be.”
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