Robert Peters is a senior research fellow for strategic deterrence in the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for National Security.
Last year, President Donald Trump shocked many people when he instructed the government to resume nuclear testing “on an equal basis” with China and Russia. This statement seemed to suggest that our adversaries were actively testing nuclear weapons, despite the fact that United States has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1992.
The president’s announcement was widely condemned. Some went so far as to suggest that China and Russia weren’t testing nuclear weapons at all and that if the United States resumed nuclear testing, it would simply trigger its adversaries to do likewise. China, meanwhile, denied carrying out any kind of nuclear testing and called upon the United States to forgo its plan.
But within days of Trump’s October announcement, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, stated “the CIA assesses that both Russia and China have conducted super-critical nuclear weapons tests,” seemingly supporting the president’s statement.
Then, on Feb. 6, Thomas DiNanno, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, gave a speech in Geneva in which he stated that “China has conducted nuclear explosive tests … with designated yields in the hundreds of tons. The PLA sought to conceal testing by obfuscating the nuclear explosions. … China has used decoupling — a method to decrease the effectiveness of seismic monitoring — to hide their activities from the world.”
On Feb. 17, Christopher Yeaw, the assistant secretary of state for arms control and nonproliferation, provided more specific details of a test that he said occurred on June 22, 2020. “The probable explosion occurred right near the Lop Nur nuclear test site,” he said, listing the seismic station that detected it, as well as the time (9:18 Coordinated Universal Time) and magnitude (2.75). He added that the test “was super critical, that it was yield producing, is pretty obvious from the seismic graphs.”
Also on Feb. 17, the executive secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty Organization issued a statement noting that at “the specific time of 9:18 a.m. UTC, on 22 June 2020, the CTBTO’s International Monitoring System detected two very small seismic events, 12 seconds apart.” The statement went on to note, however, that the CTBTO is unable to characterize nuclear explosions with a yield smaller than 500 tonnes. “These two events were far below that level,” the statement explained.
Still, the findings were consistent with those of the U.S. government: China is carrying out clandestine, very low-yield, nuclear explosive tests in a way designed to circumvent and evade the capacity of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty to characterize such tests.
China continues to deny it carried out any such tests — but has yet to invite international observers to the Lop Nur test site to assess the validity of the American claims.
So what does this all mean?
To begin with, it is important to understand that China is the world’s fastest-growing nuclear power. It refuses to engage in any kind of meaningful discussions on strategic stability, confidence building measures or transparency — nor will it participate in any preliminary arms-control discussions, and for years it has rejected joining any kind of arms-control treaties. Worse, it appears that China may be building a nuclear arsenal not for deterrence, but to engage in nuclear warfighting.
So far, all available technical data suggests that China did in fact carry out a clandestine test of a very low-yield nuclear weapon, that it did decouple the test in an underground chamber in an effort to mask the seismic effects and hide the test from the world, and is now lying about it. As such, the United States and its allies should be very concerned about Chinese intentions.
This is no longer a China that is satisfied with having a couple hundred nuclear weapons to deter an attack on the Chinese mainland, as was the case during the Cold War. This is a China that is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, building intercontinental ballistic missile silos such that it now has more than the United States, and fielding a nuclear force that can hit targets from Japan to Guam to Australia.
The fact that China may be carrying out secret nuclear explosive tests — and lying about them — should be sobering for everyone, but particularly for the United States. China seems to be preparing to fight, and potentially win, a nuclear war. The U.S. needs an updated military posture and forces to ensure it never does.
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