Should We Fear a Chinese Hypersonic Nuclear Missile?
Even if the Chinese develop hypersonic missiles, they will be deterred from attacking with them.
The latest OSIRIS Brief did not include news of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) hypersonic missile test because it is not part of the usual beat, but it surely put the national security world into a tizzy! Some of the usual suspects declared, "We are in a new Cold War with the PRC." Even the reliably left-leaning Guardian took an official editorial position saying the test heralded the arrival of a peer competitor.1 While hypersonic missile technology will be important, it will take a lot more than a few new missiles to allow the PRC to attack the US.
It bears mentioning at the outset that the reports of a test may be overblown, or completely false. Among other things, the PRC avers they were just testing a multi-use space vehicle similar to the ones billionaires have been launching all summer. The way the press and national security commentariat covered the “test,” I thought it possible the test was a response to the revelation by the Wall Street Journal that U.S. Marines were in Taiwan. But the test occurred in August, and the Financial Times only revealed the test earlier this week (paywalled) meaning the revelation was unlikely tied to anything going on recently.
Assuming the PRC did test a hypersonic nuclear-capable rocket, some analysts argued that hypersonics are almost a “golden bullet” that can bypass American defenses. There’s no reason to think America and others cannot defend against hypersonic missiles. First, America is no naif when it comes to hypersonic weapons, and by some accounts, the US is winning the hypersonic race. It isn’t even obvious hypersonics are the game changer they are sometimes made out to be. Even if the PRC is lying and they have tested a hypersonic nuclear missile, the weapon probably cannot do what some nabobs fear.
“But what if the pearl-clutchers are right?” you might ask. “Wouldn’t a weapon that can strike like a ‘bolt from the blue’ bypassing all defenses, be a mortal threat to the US?” No. American security relies on deterrence, not defense, and hypersonic missiles do not change the calculus of deterrence.
The logic of nuclear weapons can be difficult to grasp sometimes because most people think of weapons as being primarily useful when you “use” them to destroy something. Therefore a gun is only useful when you fire it, and a bomb is only useful when you drop it.2 Carrying this logic forward, people somewhat naturally conclude that having nuclear weapons means detonating nuclear weapons, and that would be bad. The primary use for nuclear weapons comes not from exploding them but from using them as a tool for deterrence.
The entire game of nuclear deterrence is in convincing your enemy not to attack you because you will retaliate with nuclear weapons. Most importantly you must convince your opponent that you have the “will” to retaliate, but proving you have the will to retaliate is easy to do when talking about your own country.3 I don’t think any serious person in China thinks that the US would not retaliate with nuclear weapons if China attacked the US with nuclear weapons. I can say authoritatively that if you think China wouldn’t at least try to retaliate with nuclear weapons if we attacked them, you are not a serious person. Of course, the “try” in that sentence is important because even if you have the will you must have a way.
The US can deter nuclear attack because no one can destroy all of its nuclear weapons before the US can launch a counter-attack. If readers are interested, I can explain the nuclear strategy in more detail in later posts. The essence of importance to this discussion is that even if Russia (the country with the most nuclear weapons other than the US) used all of its nuclear weapons against the US at once, the US could still retaliate. In fact, the US could still retaliate with so many weapons after being caught unawares that Russia would also be utterly destroyed. Being able to destroy an opponent after they attack you first is called “assured destruction,” and the US has assured destruction against any potential adversary.
Even if China has a nuclear hypersonic missile, it will not use it to attack the US for the same reason it doesn’t attack the US with the ballistic missiles it has. China does not seem to have assured destruction capabilities relative to the US for now, but that capability may be changing. China can attack the US with ballistic nuclear weapons but does not because the US would assuredly retaliate with nuclear weapons, annihilating China. Neither Chinese nor American leaders need to be good, honest, or even like each other: they just have to not want to die in a nuclear fireball or live in a nuclear wasteland to be deterred.
Whether the US can stop a hypersonic missile or not is irrelevant to defending the US. We actually cannot reliably stop ballistic missiles, and probably will never be able to stop them reliably enough to rely on defenses. The Chinese have had nuclear capabilities for decades, and it was not our “defenses” that stopped them from using them against us, but the threat that we would nuke them back. In some future day, when we have more reliable defenses against ballistic missiles, maybe hypersonics will change the ability to bypass those defenses. Even then, hypersonics will never be able to destroy American ability to retaliate, and so deterrence will hold.
I am not saying that hypersonic nuclear missiles don’t matter, but hypersonic missiles will probably affect the margins of nuclear strategy, like most new delivery systems. The Guardian editorial above correctly notes that the hypersonic missiles might be a cause for alarm for Taiwan. There are also unanswered questions about how nuclear competition would play out differently over the mostly unpopulated Pacific Ocean, compared to densely populated Central Europe. It is even possible that the main value of hypersonic weapons is to force competitors into developing expensive weapons systems at the cost of other systems useful in other arenas. We should take a technology like hypersonics seriously, but that doesn’t mean we have to lose sleep over it. You can fear if you want, but we’re no less secure than we were in July against nuclear attack.
And for all you cheeky Brits reading this, no the Guardian did not seem to think China as a competitor is a good thing.↩︎
This is not even true for conventional weapons.↩︎
This is the basic logic explained by Thomas Schelling in Arms and Influence, which I highly recommend.↩︎
David Benson is a Professor of Strategy and National Security focusing on cyberstrategy and international relations. You can reach him at dbenson@osiriscodex.com.
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