February 15, 2015
The Foreign Policy Essay: A Nuclear Asia?
For all the focus on maritime disputes in the South and East China Seas, there is an even greater peril in Asia that deserves attention: the rising salience of nuclear weapons. China’s military buildup—in particular its growing capabilities to blunt America’s ability to project effective force in the western Pacific—is threatening to change the military balance in the region. This will lead to a cascade of strategic shifts that will make nuclear weapons more central in both American and Chinese national-security plans, while increasing the danger that other regional states will seek nuclear arsenals of their own. Like it or not, nuclear weapons in Asia are back.
Read the full op-ed at Lawfare.
More from CNAS
-
Sharper: Axis of Upheaval
A loose but growing coalition between Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea demonstrates that their combined strategic interests have the potential to pose significant economic...
By Anna Pederson
-
The Will and the Power: China’s Plan to Undermine Pax Americana
From Washington’s Farewell Address to Biden’s national security strategy, the core U.S. national interest, unsurprisingly, has not changed: to ensure the fundamental security ...
By Richard Fontaine & Robert Blackwill
-
Holding China Accountable for Its Role in the Most Catastrophic Pandemic of Our Time: COVID-19
All governments and institutions must comprehensively review their actions leading up to and during the COVID-19 pandemic and take appropriate corrective action to minimize cu...
By David Feith
-
Beyond China's Black Box
China’s foreign and security policymaking apparatus is often described as a metaphorical black box about which analysts know little. That is true to an extent, but at the same...
By Jacob Stokes