Why China Has Not Acted on Western Warnings to “Disentangle” Conventional and Nuclear Missile Capabilities

For more than a decade, Western nuclear analysts have sounded the alarm over a particularly dangerous characteristic of China’s nuclear forces: They often overlap with China’s conventional forces. Should the United States and China ever go to war, a conventional US attack on an overlapping, or “entangled,” Chinese system could be misinterpreted by Chinese decision-makers as an attack on their nuclear arsenal, drastically raising the risk that such a conflict could go nuclear.

That risk is particularly acute when it comes to China’s Dongfeng-26 (DF-26) intermediate-range ballistic missile, which is deployed on a road-mobile missile launcher and can carry either a nuclear or conventional warhead. While a nuclear-armed DF-26 would likely have different support vehicles in its vicinity than a conventionally armed one, efforts to conceal and obscure DF-26 deployments during a conflict could easily lead US military analysts to mistake the two on satellite imagery, potentially resulting in a US conventional strike that knocks out a Chinese nuclear weapon. Similarly, if DF-26 missiles were to be launched, US military analysts would likely struggle to discern whether China was conducting a nuclear strike.

For years, warnings about the DF-26 and other entangled systems did not seem to reach China’s nuclear community. But as the nuclear analyst Fiona Cunningham has recently written, China’s nuclear community is now well aware of the danger posed by nuclear-conventional entanglement.