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• China’s efforts to strengthen its relatively small nuclear arsenal seem largely oriented toward improving survivability and do not appear to constitute a shift away from the country’s long-standing No First Use (NFU) policy.
• Nevertheless, the improvements are provoking anxiety in Washington, which has long resisted acknowledging a state of mutual nuclear vulnerability with China.
• The core U.S. concern is likely that improvements in China’s nuclear arsenal, even if intended only to improve survivability, will reduce the U.S. ability to limit damage in the worst-case scenario of an all-out nuclear war with China.
• The U.S. preference for damage limitation, largely through missile defense and counterforce capabilities, should not be taken to mean that the United States intends to start a nuclear war or that it believes it could emerge from a nuclear war unscathed. Rather, the likely U.S. objective is to make China to worry that if China starts a crisis or con...
• Advocates of damage limitation believe that such a capability could deter China from initiating conflict in the first place—even conflict well below the nuclear threshold—and could endow the United States with bargaining advantages in any effort to coerce China if a crisis or war did break out.

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