The China Axis, Nuclear War, and Global Peace

On Aug. 21, Naval News reported that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had launched its most sophisticated non-nuclear submarine to date. Since at least March, the PLA Rocket Force (PLARF) has had hypersonic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons to targets in the United States. The PLARF is building and arming massive silo fields with nuclear missiles in China’s northwest provinces.

Beijing complicates U.S. and allied defenses by proliferating such weapons technologies among not only U.S. adversaries—such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea—but at least one key U.S. ally: Saudi Arabia. Beijing would welcome the co-optation of multiple U.S. allies into its own orbits of economic and military alliance structures.

While attempting to co-opt countries around the world into its axis, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) demands that Washington degrade U.S. nuclear doctrine by removing its “nuclear umbrella” over allies, acquiesce to a “no first use” policy, and end military technology sharing with allies like Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the United Kingdom. If accepted, these concessions would erode U.S. deterrence against Beijing and Moscow, not only allowing their belligerence against Taiwan and Ukraine but against all of Europe and Asia.

The core of the China Axis—which includes Russia, Iran, and North Korea—is ramping up their nuclear saber rattling, conventional military operations, and the taking of hostages. The result is a rapidly deteriorating Pax Americana, in which Beijing makes outrageous demands and supports ongoing Axis violence against Ukraine and Israel. This has led Washington analysts to stop seeking nuclear arms control and instead proceed toward another nuclear arms race by supporting both greater quantities and qualities of nuclear weapons. That shift is entirely reasonable given the Axis’s nuclear threat to America and the free world.

As the leader of the China Axis, the CCP is rightly becoming the focus of U.S. nuclear deterrence. In March, President Joe Biden reoriented U.S. nuclear deterrence strategy to focus on China. The new U.S. strategy also deters an increasing threat of coordinated attacks by multiple nuclear-armed adversaries simultaneously, including not only China but also Russia and North Korea.

Former President Donald Trump has also addressed the risk, including by promotion of a U.S. iron dome missile defense system similar to the one operated successfully by Israel to defend against Iran and its proxies. Since July, a U.S. iron dome has been part of the official Republican platform. Under former President Ronald Reagan, a similar program called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was arguably not only a defensive shield but also a shield that allowed for a first strike against Soviet nuclear weapons because it defended against a Soviet second strike. The threat of such an offensive use of SDI helped bring Moscow to the bargaining table and break up the former Soviet Union. The CCP has vowed not to let the same thing happen to China.

For example, there is a risk that these two senior members of the China Axis could use North Korea, or Iran for that matter, if it increases its nuclear weapons capabilities, to conduct multiple nuclear strikes on major U.S. cities. In July, North Korea tested a single nuclear missile that would carry multiple nuclear warheads. China and Russia could provide North Korea with air defenses from any U.S. nuclear retaliation if it used such a missile against U.S. cities.

Trump said he was particularly concerned about “nuclear warming,” which he has repeatedly spoken of in the context of proliferation. He is likely referring to the adverse environmental consequences of a large-scale nuclear exchange. In the 1980s, there was similar concern over a “nuclear winter” that scientists believed could cause human and other extinctions from massive quantities of smoke and nuclear fallout, blocking the sun and causing radiation sickness.