Beijing, Jan 30: China must strengthen its nuclear deterrence and counter-strike capabilities to keep pace with the developing nuclear strategies of the United States and Russia, the official paper of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) said Tuesday.
US President Donald Trump’s administration may be pursuing the development of new nuclear weaponry and could explicitly leave open the possibility of nuclear retaliation for major non-nuclear attacks, according to a draft of a pending Nuclear Posture Review leaked by the Huffington Post.
This “unprecedented” move by the United States, combined with continuous quality improvements of nuclear arsenals in both the US and Russia, means that both countries place greater importance on deterrence and real combat usability, the commentary in the PLA Daily said.
“In the roiling unpredictability of today’s world, to upgrade the capability of our country’s deterrence strategy, to support our great power position… we must strengthen the reliability and trustworthiness of our nuclear deterrence and nuclear counterstrike capabilities,”
it said.
The article was written by two researchers from the PLA Academy of Military Science, a top research institute directly responsible to China’s Central Military Commission.
A change was necessary despite China having developed nuclear weapons to avoid bullying from nuclear powers, the paper said, adding that China would always stick to the principle of “no first use” and a final goal of eliminating nuclear weapons.
Neither Russia nor the United States is abandoning nuclear weapons as each adopts new high-tech weapons capabilities, the paper said, pointing to the US Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of maintenance and modernisation of the US nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years costing more than $1.2 trillion. Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping was elected deputy to the 13th National People’s Congress (NPC) by a unanimous vote at the first session of the 13th regional people’s congress of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Tuesday. Xi was nominated by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) as a candidate for deputy to the 13th NPC, which was put to a vote at the regional congress, Xinhua news agency reported.