Reliance upon a China NFU is uncertain—Taiwan proves
Gabriel Collins and Andrew S. Erickson, 9/25/2023 [(Gabriel Collins is the Baker Botts Fellow in Energy & Environmental Regulatory Affairs at Rice University’s Baker Institute, Collins has worked in the Department of Defense as a China analyst and as a private sector global commodity researcher, authoring more than 100 commodity analysis reports, both for private clients and for publication. Dr. Andrew S. Erickson is Professor of Strategy (tenured full professor) in the U.S. Naval War College (NWC)’s China Maritime Studies Institute, Erickson helped initiate, and was part of, the original ‘China Maritime Studies Group’ that approached NWC’s Provost in fall 2004 with the idea of creating CMSI.) Reaping the whirlwind: How China’s coercive annexation of Taiwan could trigger nuclear proliferation in Asia and beyond | Baker Institute. (9/25/2023) Baker Institute. https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/reaping-whirlwind-how-chinas-coercive-annexation-taiwan-could-trigger-nuclear#_edn45)
Beijing’s nuclear strategy, redlines, and limits remain highly uncertain: China is developing its forces rapidly while offering neither substantial transparency nor dialogue, to say nothing of confidence-building measures, let alone binding arms control agreements of the sort that Washington and Moscow concluded successfully in later Cold War years. Beijing officially maintains a strict No First Use (NFU) policy, but it seems unlikely that it could be relied upon in the event of foreign strikes that threatened PRC command and control (C2) nodes or major strategic effects, or in the event that the Party and its Army faced failure in a Taiwan conflict.[43] Risks of confusion, misperception, and escalation are all heightened by PRC comingling of nuclear and conventional missiles, or the “dispersal of mobile missile systems to hide sites” whereby it may be unclear which type of system is where at a given time.[44] As part of this risk-raising approach, China “may be exploring development of conventionally-armed intercontinental range missile systems. ... Such capabilities would allow the PRC to threaten conventional strikes against targets in the continental United States, Hawaii, and Alaska. Conventionally-armed ICBMs would present significant risks to strategic stability.”[45] Figure 7 depicts the respective range rings of PRC conventional strike systems (i.e., missiles, some of which are aircraft-delivered, thereby extending their range) that are already operational.