Troubled times for balloons, espionage and otherwise. On the one hand, the US recognizes that the problem with China’s spy balloons did not start now but has existed for years, which is reinforced by Taiwan’s announcements that it often receives such… meteorological visits. On the other hand, China has counterattacked, underlining that it too has recorded a number of similar violations in recent years.
All this, in addition to giving rise to the risk that the air forces of the countries involved will start shooting down anything that crosses their airspace from a height above, possibly starting with the particularly useful data-gathering weather balloons, point to a very significant escalation of tension between China and the US.
The strategic nuclear arms race
Although for a while we thought that strategic nuclear weapons belonged more to the Cold War era, and no country was willing to try an aggressive move (“first strike”), when the respective nuclear weapons were enough to invoke “Mutually Assured “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD), have now returned to the fore.
This mainly happened after the war in Ukraine and the debate about the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons and whether it would lead to the escalation and eventually the use of strategic nuclear weapons.
We note that until now the number of nuclear weapons has been decreasing under the START agreement. Suffice it to say that in 1991 the US had 10,000 nuclear warheads in launch systems capable of hitting the Soviet Union, namely the “nuclear triad” of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), missile-capable submarines, and strategic bombers. . In 2018 the limit was set at 1550 heads.
However, there had long been a re-planning of their eventual use (mainly submarines) so that they could also cover China, while a debate had also opened on whether their total number was sufficient.
As for China, the Pentagon’s estimate in 2020 was that China had over 200 nuclear warheads and that the number would double by the end of the decade. In 2021, the estimate was that China would have 700 nuclear warheads by 2027 and at least a thousand by 2030. In 2022 a Pentagon report estimated that China had over 400 nuclear warheads and that it could have an arsenal 1500 nuclear warheads by 2035.
In addition, it appears that a classified letter from the US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), the US military’s unified nuclear deterrence command, sent to Congress speaks of China’s nuclear warhead superiority in intercontinental ballistic missiles, while last May and the head of the US Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard warned that the US faced an increased risk of deterrence vis-à-vis Russia and China. He even pointed out that the biggest challenge came from China having reached at least 360 silos for solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Although these statements were related to the Strategic Command’s pressure not to scrap the program to develop nuclear-tipped cruise missiles for submarines, they reflect a real concern.
In fact, some point out that China has invested in combining reinforced silos with missiles that can be transported by rail and road. This enables them to be a “first strike” force, unlike US ICBMs and nuclear submarines which are mainly “mutually assured destruction” weapons and not necessarily “first strike”. On the other hand, it is important that the US is making great efforts to install anti-ballistic arrays especially near Russia, with anti-ballistic missiles considered in practice a first-strike weapon and the US having unilaterally withdrawn from the relevant agreement to ban them.
Why is there a spy balloon issue now?
It is against this background that it becomes clear that both China has a great interest in trying to gather as much information as possible about the US nuclear arsenal, as well as the US in trying to record the corresponding information about China’s arsenal. This may explain both the overflights of satellites and the sending of Chinese spy balloons over areas where US intercontinental ballistic missile silos are located.
A picture is beginning to form that such overflights have taken place in the past in both countries, at least based on what is being reported. In this sense, what is happening now is not so much surveillance and espionage, but the fact that it is being treated as a cause of political and diplomatic confrontation.
And this is because intelligence agencies and governments often avoid opening this issue, because they know that they are doing the same and therefore prefer the obfuscation that also ensures the continuity of their own espionage operations.
So it’s becoming an issue now, to have repeated downing of flying objects and to have a crisis in US-China relations is precisely because we are in a tense phase between the two countries anyway.
China and the US: interdependence and conflict
China and the US, despite the belligerent tone they have adopted recently, are actually extremely interdependent on the economic level.
The U.S. shift more toward the financial sphere in recent decades meant that China became the world’s “big factory” and the field where the high-tech products that U.S. multinationals produced and exported were assembled. Accordingly, the expansion of US debt assumed that China could buy much of it. And of course China itself for a long time based its high growth rates on the way it was able to exploit this interdependence.
Certainly in recent years both countries have been trying to limit this degree of interdependence. The US is again looking for ways to revitalize its domestic industrial base – the design of the Biden administration’s “green package” is indicative in this regard – and is trying to cut off China from access to high-tech manufacturing technologies, especially in the semiconductor industry. For its part, China is trying to make a major shift not only to technological self-sufficiency, seeking to be able to greatly expand what it can produce on its own, but also to leveraging domestic consumption as a growth driver.
However, this has not diminished the significant interdependence, reflected both in all statistics on the scale of bilateral economic relations, but also in the importance that China maintains in global supply chains.
But at the same time there is also the element of competition. China clearly aspires to be the world’s largest economy in the medium term and bids to expand its political influence. It does not have a strategy of “world hegemony”, at least for now, unlike the whole complex system of influence relations, international institutions and military bases and alliances that the US has, but it is already trying to acquire a wide range of alliances. And of course it invests impressively in acquiring military superpower characteristics.
For its part, the US at the same time wants to upgrade its economy, to rebuild its internal social and political cohesion, deeply injured on various levels in recent years, and of course to maintain a hegemonic position, while seeing the power of China to increases and having to deal with the way another superpower, Russia, tries armed to challenge the perceived arrangements of the international landscape.
In addition, especially in this period, we also have the pressure, especially from the Republicans, for even greater “decisiveness” towards China, even though Donald Trump had not reacted in this way to overflights of Chinese spy balloons during his own term – after all, the very fact of the of Chinese spy balloon overflights over Trump has now become known. Characteristic is the attitude of the new Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, who has declared that he intends to visit Taiwan, even though he is well aware that this is a challenge for Beijing, which had responded with a show of military power to last year’s visit by Nancy Pelosi. then speaker of the American House, in Taiwan.
One could argue that this is also where the causes of the current tension between the two countries can be found: in the combination between a trajectory of conflict that has real depth and an economic interdependence that has not actually diminished. This is what charges every occasion for confrontation and pushes them on a collision course. This explains why an incident that is part of regular intelligence gathering practices – in which both countries engage – translates into a starting point for a more comprehensive confrontation.
