China is on the verge of making a breakthrough in its nuclear arms capabilities that would amount to a major shift in global security balance, Admiral Charles Richard, the head of the US Strategic Command, has written in testimony prepared for a hearing on Capitol Hill, Bloomberg reported on Monday.
The official is scheduled to meet the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee at a closed-door hearing on Tuesday. China’s “breathtaking expansion” of its strategic nuclear arsenal means a rapidly escalating risk to Washington, Richard believes.
The admiral particularly refers to an intercontinental ballistic missile-launched hypersonic glider test Beijing conducted in July 2021. The operation saw the hypersonic vehicle flying some 40,000 kilometers for more than 100 minutes, according to the testimony. It was “the greatest distance and longest flight time of any land attack weapon system of any nation to date,” he supposedly said.
This technological advancement on China’s part would mean “serious implications for strategic stability,” Richard warned, adding that US military capabilities and strategies rely on an “assumption that strategic deterrence, and in particular nuclear deterrence, will hold.”
“If strategic or nuclear deterrence fails, integrated deterrence and no other plan or capability in the DoD will work as designed,” he added. As a result, the US Strategic Command believes America might have to deal with two potential adversaries possessing vast and modernized nuclear arsenals: China and Russia.
Both these nations now have the capability to “unilaterally escalate a conflict to any level of violence, in any domain, worldwide, with any instrument of national power, and at any time,” the admiral has apparently written in his testimony.
Richard has been warning about the rapidly changing strategic balance for quite some time now. He already stated, during his visit to Europe in October 2021, that China’s and Russia’s combined nuclear capabilities would send the US into “uncharted waters.” At that time, he also warned that Beijing is now fairly capable of executing “any possible nuclear employment strategy.”
