The Asian nuclear power of which the US must take account is not North Korea but China.
The forerunners of China’s government were able to defeat Chiang Kai-shek, fight the United States to a draw in Korea and, merely by means of their country’s looming potential, help defeat America in Vietnam. Since 1978, the Chinese have deliberately modeled themselves on the Meiji (who rapidly transformed feudal Japan into an industrial state).
In altering their position relative to that of the United States, the Chinese have received generous assistance from the past two American presidents, who have accomplished first a carefree diminution of American orders of battle and then the incompetent deployment of what was left, in a campaign analogous to losing a protracted struggle with Portugal. China advances and Americans decline because, among other things, its vision is disciplined and clear, while Americans’ is burdened by fear, decadence and officials who understand neither Chinese grand strategy nor its nuclear component.
This has led the United States unwittingly to encourage China to move toward nuclear parity. In the next five years, as the US reduces its arsenal from 10,000 strategic warheads to 1,700, China’s MIRV’d silo-based missiles and imminent generations of MIRV’d mobile and sea-based ICBMs will easily allow a breakout from warhead numbers now variously estimated at a range of 80 to 1,800.
As the US has cut the stable sea-based leg of its nuclear deterrent from 37 ballistic missile submarines to 14, China works to build its own and a fleet that can provide protected bastions at sea as well as hunt down the small number of American boats on station.
Nuclear competition between mature and newly emerging powers is neither unprecedented nor unexpected, but the rule has always been that if nuclear potential exists it must be countered. Although the US may no longer subscribe to this, China does. Aware that the United States planned to use nuclear weapons had China violated the Korean armistice, China would understandably seek nuclear balance, if not preponderance.
Given China’s appetites and American alliances and interests, a war is not inconceivable in Taiwan, or in Korea. To remove American nuclear escalation from the equation, China would need not parity but only a deterrent such as it has long possessed.
Chinese know that every facet of America’s economy, military and society depends on individual and networked electronic devices. Were these to fail all at once and irreparably, the nation would seize up, perhaps for years.
Faced with victory, or with loss, the Chinese might choose to detonate half a dozen high-megatonnage nuclear charges in the mesosphere, in an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) strike perhaps not even in American airspace, cooking almost every circuit and semiconductor, rendering the American government blind, deaf and dumber than it is already and the country unable to resist the inroads that would surely follow.
Though the US would undoubtedly respond in kind, China is not as technically dependent as are Americans. Nor, given China’s sufficiency for a counterstrike, could Americans deter an EMP attack with the prospect of massive retaliation, especially because an EMP strike, with no immediate casualties, would seem as peaceful as snow in still air.
The trick in nuclear strategy is to maintain stability by balancing potentials and thus to discourage events from converting the hypothetical to the actual. Required in this case — only one of many — is the electronic hardening, redundancy and redesign of essential systems and networks; and missile defense, which would not only close the first-strike window by shielding American second-strike capacity from destruction but protect against an EMP strike directly and dissuade China in the first place by making its deterrent less certain.
Were the US to proceed along these lines, it could diminish the chances that China might in the not-so-distant future be tempted to win a nuclear war without fighting a nuclear war. But given that Americans have ignored explicit warnings of the congressionally chartered EMP commission, what are the chances that the US will act on an opinion it dare not even form?
In regard to war and the sometimes counterintuitive actions for avoiding it, Americans are no longer either confident or clearsighted. What a pity to have come so far to find that America’s rivals and enemies all over the world can run rings around the US because half of American politicians have lost their intelligence and the other half have lost their nerve.
