Since 2020, China is believed to have tripled its nuclear arsenal to 600 warheads—enough to begin to shift the strategic balance, if still well short of the thousands held by the United States and Russia.
“China’s trying to catch up because, you know, they’re, they’re very substantially behind, but within five or six years they’ll be even,” President Trump said in February.
But will they? Perhaps the biggest unknown of this new nuclear age is how many weapons Beijing will ultimately hold. Its buildup has a few logical endpoints, and by examining each possibility, observers can better understand what China is seeking.
The best place to start to game out where China’s nuclear program is going is to look back at where it has been. Beijing first tested a nuclear weapon in October 1964 and from then until the late 2010s practiced a strategy of minimal nuclear deterrence. That meant maintaining only a couple hundred nuclear weapons, eschewing nuclear arms racing with Washington and Moscow, and instead investing in growing the Chinese economy and the conventional forces of its military, the People’s Liberation Army. Fast forward to the current decade, and Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has shed his country’s historical approach and expanded the country’s nuclear arsenal at a speedy clip.
Though the pace of production has changed, the destination remains opaque. Three potential endpoints stand out. First, China could level off its warhead count well short of the 1,550 deployed strategic weapons that Washington and Moscow hold under the New START treaty. With up to a thousand warheads, Beijing would create and then entrench a nuclear stalemate with the United States, but one that applies only at the regional level. Still, it would negate the escalatory leverage the United States historically enjoyed due to its larger force. Reaching this level would also give the Chinese leadership greater confidence and flexibility to make implied or overt nuclear threats during a crisis or conflict over regional flashpoints such as Taiwan. But ending production at 1,000 warheads would require Xi to slow or even reverse a policy he himself set in motion.
A second stopping point could be when China’s total arsenal matches the number of warheads deployed by the United States or Russia. In 2022, DoD projected that China could have 1,500 warheads by 2035—the year Xi has called for the PLA to “basically” achieve modernization. This rudimentary type of nuclear weapons parity seems consistent and logical. It is also likely what Trump meant by “be even.”
China might, however, adopt a more comprehensive standard for parity, one that requires matching other powers’ arsenals when all functioning nuclear warheads are counted. This would include warheads that major powers currently deploy and those held in reserve, as well as strategic warheads with massive explosive power and so-called nonstrategic warheads that are still powerful but less so.
This would require a colossal undertaking. The United States possesses 3,700 warheads across its stockpiles. Open-source estimates say China has built about 100 warheads per year since 2023. At that rate, it would take Beijing 31 more years, or until 2056, to reach 3,700. Of course, it could accelerate production. At its Cold War peak from the late 1950s to mid-1960s, the U.S. produced thousands of warheads per year. Reaching 3,700 warheads would leave no doubt that China’s nuclear arsenal fit into Xi’s longer-term goal for the PLA to become a “world-class military” by mid-century.
Beijing’s third option would be to build beyond parity—to try to surpass the United States and Russia in search of overall nuclear supremacy. China’s rapid military modernization in other areas, particularly missiles and ships, demonstrate how the country’s manufacturing sector thrives when producing on gargantuan scale. And once factories start humming, jobs and bureaucratic interests make them hard to turn off. Moreover, old constraints such as the availability of fissile material no longer pose insurmountable obstacles.
Yet this kind of nuclear surge would feed deep apprehension about the costs of nuclear arms races. The cardinal cautionary tale for Communist Party leadership is the role that high military spending and resulting economic stagnation played in the fall of the Soviet Union. China’s economy is much stronger than the Soviet economy ever was, so Beijing has more fiscal space for expansion. But that space is still finite, particularly given the slowdown of China’s civilian economy and the pressure within its military budget that will come as sustainment costs mount for large numbers of aging ships, aircraft, and other platforms.
Where China’s arsenal ends up will likely depend in part on the response of the United States as well as Russia, India, and possibly other countries. But it is not clear what would give China more impetus to build up. If Washington and Moscow stay roughly at New START levels—despite the treaty’s likely formal demise next February—China could sprint toward parity at the 1,550-warhead level. But the inverse could just as well hold true: If China sees the other major powers jettisoning arms-control constraints, Beijing could accelerate its program further to keep up.
For now, China’s nuclear trajectory indicates that the country will, at a minimum, seek effective parity at the regional level. Where it goes from there is unknown. To be sure, the overall capability of its nuclear arsenal depends on more than just the number of warheads. Beijing can keep upgrading its nuclear missiles, submarines, and aircraft, along with their command-and-control networks, regardless of its warhead count. China could also divide its arsenal into deployed and reserve warheads, further complicating comparisons to other major powers.
Diplomatically, Beijing refuses to acknowledge that it is engaged in a nuclear buildup. Neither has China explained its rationale for expansion or articulated any ultimate target the country is building toward. Xi himself might not know, preferring instead to see how the global security landscape unfolds. What is clear is that China has already stepped up nuclear signaling. Last fall, it test-launched an ICBM over the Pacific Ocean for the first time since 1980. Beijing clearly seeks the deterrence and prestige benefits of additional signaling. Those same factors could eventually make China willing to incrementally increase transparency. For example, Beijing gave the Pentagon advance notice of the aforementioned ICBM test. Separately, in June official Chinese media shared new details about the country’s upgraded DF-5B ICBM.
Washington and its allies, meanwhile, will be forced to respond to Beijing’s nuclear buildup without a reliable estimate of how much China ultimately intends to expand its nuclear arsenal. That reality will necessarily shape nuclear diplomacy among major powers, including both the fate of New START and any future arms control and nuclear risk reduction agreements, or lack thereof. Uncertainty about the trajectory of China’s buildup will also influence American choices about its own nuclear forces, along with excruciating budgetary tradeoffs with conventional capabilities. American policymakers must grapple with the China nuclear challenge on its own terms and given closer China-Russia geopolitical cooperation. The U.S. National Defense Strategy, currently being written in the Pentagon, will presumably provide some initial answers to those quandaries.
China’s nuclear expansion is already feeding an arms race—a contest that is accelerating partly because the finish line remains unknown.
Jacob Stokes is Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. He previously served as an advisor in the White House and the U.S. Congress.
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