China's nuclear stockpile has grown from roughly 200 warheads in 2020 to about 600 today, and could reach 1,000 by the end of the decade, according to the Pentagon's China Military Power Report. Brookings Institution scholars Amy J. Nelson and Michael E. O'Hanlon say this expansion is reshaping the global strategic balance in ways that Cold War frameworks were never designed to handle.
The assessment comes from a new analysis published by the Brookings Institution, as reported by "Hvylya".
If many of those warheads end up on long-range delivery platforms like intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States, Nelson and O'Hanlon warned that "the size of China's strategic arsenal could approach that of Russia and the United States." That would transform what was once a two-player deterrence game into something far more complex and unstable.
The scholars pointed out that the binding numerical ceilings that defined decades of U.S.-Russia arms control "make less sense in a world where China and Russia are strategically aligned." Beijing has so far refused to participate in any arms limitation framework, arguing that its stockpile is far smaller than those of Washington and Moscow. But at the current pace of expansion, that claim no longer holds water.
The growth is not happening in a vacuum. China's nuclear buildup runs alongside its investments in missile defense and an expanding arsenal of shorter-range strike platforms and drones. Together, these trends have made the old calculus obsolete. Counting warheads and delivery vehicles alone is no longer enough to measure strategic stability.
Nelson and O'Hanlon proposed that the international community move toward transparency-based frameworks rather than legally binding caps. In a tripolar world, they argued, the more immediate task is "to prevent worst-case planning from driving unrestrained competition."
"Hvylya" earlier analyzed how China outperforms the United States in the competition that truly matters.