Policy Forum:

Today, China has the ability to conduct a large-scale, conventional missile strike against the US and its allies. This carries the real risk that the Chinese army might think it can brief its political masters with a plausible theory of victory. Stephan Frühling assesses the possibilities in this chapter from Nuclear Asia, the new publication from the ANU College of Asia & the Pacific.

For much of the atomic age, intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs) have been the epitome of nuclear arsenals in popular imagination and in the policies of many states seeking to join the nuclear club. Threatening the certainty of immediate destruction of an adversary’s homeland, ICBMs more than any other weapon are associated with the condition of mutual assured destruction between the two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States.

ICBMs made their first appearance in Asia in the early 1960s, aboard US Polaris submarines and in the depths of Siberia. These were followed by China’s deployment of the Dongfeng-5 land-based ICBMs in the early 1980s. In more recent years, Pakistan and India have both fielded ballistic missiles of sufficient range to strike each other’s territory, while India’s Agni V missile program will soon give it the ability to range all of China’s population centres as well.