China seeks to join the nuclear big league

WHEN AMERICA and the Soviet Union raced each other to build ever-larger nuclear arsenals during the cold war, China ambled disdainfully. It did not detonate its first nuclear weapon until 1964, kept only a few hundred warheads compared with the tens of thousands piled up by the superpowers, and to this day maintains it will never be the first to use nukes in a war. Now China is sprinting to catch up.

In its latest annual assessment, the Pentagon says China’s stockpile of nuclear warheads, which last year it reckoned to be in the “low-200s”, could triple to about 700 by 2027 and will probably quintuple to about 1,000 or more by 2030. That is sharply higher than America’s previous forecast that the arsenal would double in size by then. Even so, it would still be smaller than America’s or Russia’s. Those countries each have about 4,000 warheads.