Avoiding Nuclear Escalation in a Conflict with China

Deanna Lee

You're listening to Policy Minded, a podcast from RAND. I'm Deanna Lee. On today's show, we'll discuss a series of reports entitled Denial Without Disaster. The study considers a dangerous scenario. What if China invades Taiwan, the U.S. intervenes, and the world's two superpowers engage in direct military conflict? The authors explore what the U.S. could do in this situation to achieve its military and political objectives—win the conflict—without triggering catastrophic nuclear escalation. Two of those authors are with us today, Dahlia Goldfeld and Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga. Dahlia is a senior information scientist at RAND who specializes in Air Force adoption of emerging technology and modeling and simulation. And Nathan is a senior policy researcher who focuses on Asian security issues. Dahlia, Nathan, welcome.

Dahlia Goldfeld

Thanks so much.

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga

Thanks for having us.

Deanna Lee

Okay, first off, I talked about this in the introduction, but can you tell us more about the specific scenario or scenarios that you were looking at in this study?

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga

Absolutely. So this project was designed from the start to be publicly released to inform public understanding and public discussion about this really important topic. We knew that DoD was really focused on China as the pacing threat and specifically a Taiwan scenario as the pacing scenario. However, we really wanted to open a lot of space for our project to think about all different kinds of challenges for this conflict. And so we didn't pick a specific detailed single version of kind of a canonical Taiwan scenario. There's been a lot of great work recently by RAND and others, I'll flag a wonderful report from CSIS in 2023—the First Battle of the War—that really has talked a lot about what a Taiwan scenario might look like specifically, but for our project, we wanted to pick the right scenario for Taiwan, but leave the rest of it open-ended and that's how we approached it.

Deanna Lee

Nathan, can you talk a little bit broadly about what a canonical Taiwan scenario actually is?

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga

Sure. So for our purposes here, what we're talking about is a couple of different steps. So first is in Beijing, a political decision that China must, from their perspective, must use military force to resolve the longstanding political issue of Taiwan's de facto independence from the People's Republic of China. This has been a long-standing goal, stated goal of PRC leadership. Current leader Xi Jinping has very clearly renewed and highlighted prominence of the Taiwan issue. Also, the U.S. government has said publicly that Xi Jinping has directed the Chinese military to be prepared by 2027, be prepared to invade Taiwan if necessary. So this makes this scenario very real. So if Xi Jinping gives the order, what would it look like? Obviously that's a very complicated issue, but some really great research over the 10 plus, 20 years helped understand the basic muscle movement, according to Chinese military doctrine, of what that would look like. It would possibly or most likely include Chinese amphibious invasion, so it's putting Chinese military troops on boats, driving them across the Taiwan Strait, which is about 100 miles, landing on Taiwan, taking Taipei, that's the political capital. This would be accompanied with an air assault or an aerial part of the invasion as well, and then there would likely be additional what the Chinese military call firepower strikes, which is rocket and missile strikes on Taiwan and other parts of Asia that are supporting a potential U.S. intervention. So, this would be dramatic, severe, ugly use of military force by China against Taiwan. And if the United States intervenes, potentially the United States's, the U.S. military's forces in Asia as well.

Deanna Lee

And how did you conduct the actual analysis once you figured out your approach or how you were going to examine these potential scenarios?

Dahlia Goldfeld

So the project was set up from the get-go to be a little bit unusual in the sense that we were looking at what could cause China to use a nuclear weapon first, and China, as Nathan will talk about later, has a no-first-use policy. So we're kind of inverting what at least is the declaratory policy. Furthermore, we were sponsored by Air Force Global Strike Command, and their primary interest was the role of long-range strike systems that they have under their purview, in potentially triggering China to basically not follow its own policy and use a nuclear weapon first. There are obviously so many potential reasons that a country could choose to use a nuclear weapon or be deterred against it, right, or choose not to use one at all. Long-range strike is but one of those potential triggers. So you could say that trying to isolate the role of long-range strike is a little bit challenging because you have to take the context of the entire war. So to try to crack this nut, we took the following approach. We had four main lines of effort. The first was doing China-related research. So Nathan led that effort. So. The questions there are, well, what is the Chinese policy? What is the actual Chinese policy behind the closed doors, behind curtains, and things like that? And to do that, we looked at a wide range of English and Chinese literature. And the second line of effort was, what is the current status of US long-range strike? And we'll talk about that more later, but just recall that we were asked to do this at an unclassified level. Long-range-strike is a highly sensitive subject, so we did what we could to evaluate the current and planned long-range strike at that open publicly available level. The third line of effort was looking at historic and strategic literature. There's a ton that has been written about since the dawn of the nuclear age on nuclear strategy and nuclear theory. So we wanted to ground whatever we said could be the relationship between long-range strike and Chinese nuclear first use. We wanted to ground it in Chinese research and the strategic theory and history when possible. And then the fourth line of effort, which was the most significant in terms of the time spent on it, was to try to knit all the first three lines of effort together and link long-range strike to potential Chinese nuclear first use in the context of a Taiwan scenario. So to do that, we had a broad framework that we created where we said, well, what could possibly trigger nuclear use? And to do that, we came up with this theoretical list of what we called logics. So broadly speaking, one could choose to use a nuclear weapon intentionally. One could accidentally do it. One could inadvertently do it, potentially one could be catalyzed to do it and I'm putting catalyzed in quotes because that's basically the idea of having a third party intervene and cause a spiral where things get out of control. And then for each of these logics, we had specific pathways, which were basically distinct series of events or sequences of events that you could plausibly imagine leading to nuclear use. And then for each of these pathways, we said, well, what's a vignette that we can come up with where China is the one to use the nuclear weapon first? And these vignettes are extremely high level, extremely broad. We wrote them up in volume four of the series in detail, but these are very high level, they're just supposed to be, you know, motivators that show that this is at least seems plausible. And from there we said, okay, so we have our vignettes. What's the touch point or the intersection between U.S. long-range strike and those vignettes? And from their, what are the lessons learned or what are implications for long-range strike? Meaning, what could the U.S. do either in its creation of, development of, or employment of long-range strike that would impact nuclear use.

Deanna Lee

And we're going to dig into some of those lines of efforts a little bit more. But before we do, I just want to take a step back. Nathan, can you talk a little bit more about China's nuclear threshold? Is that something that the U.S. knows with confidence? And how did that factor into your analysis?

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga

Right, so when we talk about nuclear threshold, what we're really talking about is at some point in time, the Chinese leadership authorizing or ordering the use of Chinese nuclear weapons against somebody else. That's a big deal. It only happened twice before by one other country, United States in World War II. And so we certainly don't know, and it's quite possible that even Chinese leadership doesn't know exactly today, when in a future hypothetical conflict, they would decide they need to use nuclear weapons. So I think it's very important, you know, to be transparent, both did so in our report and here with listeners now, that this is certainly not a perfect prediction with 100% confidence of how China may act in a future conflict. Our goal with the research was to identify potential drivers that the U.S. military could perhaps try to account for and reduce the risk of triggering for Chinese nuclear first use. This is absolutely something you can't know with confidence. The other part of our research, part of the reason we adopted the methodology that Dahlia talked about is because we would argue human intuition of what is more likely to cross the nuclear threshold or less likely to cross the nuclear threshold, may be a poor predictor of when Beijing or other actors actually do decide to use nuclear weapons. So we wanted to take as much an inductive approach as a deductive approach in trying to understand what might drive Chinese nuclear first use. So we tried to take a pretty comprehensive approach. We are absolutely not saying with 100% confidence it's only these six potential triggers that might lead China to use the nuclear weapons or it's the only these 17 pathways that ever lead to a scenario where China is actually using nuclear weapons first. But we hope that this report, this research will provide kind of a starting point for people to think more holistically on their own, furthermore, about what might drive China to use nuclear weapons, and then obviously, the real important part for us, how can the United States work to reduce those pressures on China, make it less attractive for China to use nuclear weapons?

Deanna Lee

And we're gonna dig into some of those lines of efforts a little bit more, but before we do, I just wanna take a step back and ask about something you write in the report that might kind of help set the stage a little bit. You write that the U.S. must reconsider its approach to a potential conflict with China. Can you talk about what has been the U.S. approach historically and why does it need to change?

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga

Sure, so for this project, we kind of developed a simplistic framework to understand kind of the option space for U.S. military planners and the broader policy community for how the U.S. military has been employed. You can think of, we call this the trade-off triangle. And there's kind of three points, right? Operational effectiveness, force survivability and escalation management. In the post-Cold War era, when the U.S. was fighting regional powers without nuclear weapons, that could not credibly pose any type of significant threat against the U.S. homeland. The U.S. military and U.S. political leadership were able to prioritize operational effectiveness and force survivability over escalation management. Because frankly, the escalation concerns were just not very grave. Were not very stark. And so really the question for U.S. military planners was, how do you balance just between operational effectiveness and force survivability? And a lot of these times in these conflicts, force survivabilty issues, especially for the Air Force, were also not grave. It was really just optimizing on one of these three pillars, operational effectiveness. However, we argue that thinking about a potential conflict with China, whether over Taiwan or any other issue, if you're going to imagine direct conflict with China now that China has secured second strike capability, it really requires a different mindset to not just optimize on one aspect for operational effectiveness, but to really start reconsidering, learning again some of these lessons from the Cold War about how do you also consider force survivability because they have very strong military capability and, even more importantly, escalation management because of their survivable second strike nuclear capability. And Dahlia can talk about that.

Dahlia Goldfeld

I mean, I don't have much more to add, but Nathan's absolutely right. China has a large and rapidly growing, or at least planned to be rapidly growing nuclear arsenal. They also have a tremendous number of conventional, very long-range weapons that could be deployed and hit the United States. So escalation management is just going to be beyond essential if we were to actually have an armed conflict, kinetic conflict with China. And I think one important thing for anyone listening to keep in mind is that the homeland is not a sanctuary when it comes to a conflict with China. There are multiple ways that they could attack us here in the United States. So it really has to be taken extremely seriously.

Deanna Lee

Absolutely. And I also want to emphasize the hypothetical nature of this conflict that we're talking about. Of course, in an ideal world, the U.S. would be able to avoid one altogether, but your research is specifically looking at what happens once one has been set off, correct?

Dahlia Goldfeld

That's right. We did not look at the role of long-range strike or the role if anything else for that matter in the lead up to a conflict or trying to deter a conflict altogether. Of course, the whole world and definitely Nathan and I hope that there is no war. But I think we have to accept that it could happen.

Deanna Lee

Let's get into each side of that hypothetical conflict. Dahlia, you mentioned on one hand, you're looking at the U.S. long-range strike capability. And on the other, we're talking about China's nuclear threshold, its nuclear capabilities. So let's start with the U.S. side. Can you tell us what exactly do you mean when you say long-range strike?

Dahlia Goldfeld

Sure. So for the purposes of our research, we were talking about conventional long-range strike. Often when people talk about long- range strike, they're talking about nuclear weapons. We are explicitly not including nuclear weapons because we are talking about U.S. actions with long-ranged strike that would precipitate Chinese nuclear first use. So we are talking about the joint set of U.S. munitions that can go more than 500 kilometers and are kinetic. So, we're excluding cyber.

Deanna Lee

Gotcha. Makes sense. So how has U.S. long-range strike been evolving and in what ways is the U.S. investing in it.

Dahlia Goldfeld

Yeah, so it's a complicated question that can't be addressed in a very short time period, but suffice it to say, I think for our audience, that the abrogation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the INF Treaty, that had major impacts, because that essentially enabled the Army to get into the game and pursue a long-range strike of their own. And as our adversaries have become stronger, they've become better at detecting U.S. systems, at intercepting U.S. systems, at preventing our systems from being effective. And they have created their own systems to be better at not being shot by our systems. So that, you know, it's the classic cat-and-mouse game that we've seen militaries engage in forever. And long-range strike is not in any way immune to that. So in terms of the evolution, you could think about things like getting stealthier, getting more ability to, what's the right word? To fly like new trajectories, not just simple ballistic trajectories. A big one that we hear about is the push for hypersonics. I think that there's a perception that the U.S. is falling behind in hypersonics technology and therefore there's been a big push to try to level the playing field there. And a big one happened quite recently was the Air Force showcased its newest long-range strike weapons platform, the B-21 Stealth Bomber, and it can hold a whole lot of, you know, a whole lot of long-range munitions. So yeah, there's been a lot of, there's a lot work going on in the long-range strike world.

Deanna Lee

I'm sure we could spend a lot of time talking about all of that. But let's pivot to one of the core questions you were trying to answer in this research. What are the primary ways that U.S. long-range strike might potentially trigger a nuclear response from China?

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga

Yeah, so this is a big question. This is something that various U.S. and other researchers have been interested in for a long time. But our project, to the best of our knowledge, is the first time anyone has been perhaps bold enough to actually specifically try to list down the most likely drivers of Chinese nuclear first use. Now, it's important to say this list is certainly not perfectly predictive. This is trying to help identify potential catalysts or drivers of future behavior. That's a very fraught topic. But we base our research on immense in-depth Chinese language research into very authoritative Chinese military texts that we talk more about in our published report. And we also work through a lot of kind of theoretical exercises about understanding what types of U.S. activities or even characteristics might drive any country to use nuclear weapons. And we talked through a lot of different variables that another country might observe or worry about that could drive nuclear use. And the number one thing we kept coming back to was target selections. In another word, you can imagine that in a conflict, there's a lot of things another country might not actually know or understand in the fog of war. But what we would argue is the one thing you're going to know is what actually is blowing up in the country. You may know something blew up, you don't know when did it blow up. You don't why did it blow up. You may not know who blew it up. You may have assumptions or evidence or conjecture about any one of those, but the one you'll probably know is what actually happened. And so we focused on the targets that are more likely, we argue, to drive China to use nuclear weapons first. We came up with six answers. First is U.S. conventional attacks on the Chinese Communist Party, CCP leadership. So namely, decapitation. U.S. conventional attacks on Chinese nuclear forces, including dual-capable assets and nuclear-related command and control. Third, U.S. conventional attacks on Chinese critical infrastructure, especially those that generate large-scale civilian casualties. Fourth, U. S. conventional attacks on Chinese civilian nuclear infrastructure. Fifth, U.S. medium or high-intensity conventional attacks on major Chinese cities and other Chinese political or economic centers. And lastly, sixth, any U.S. conventional attack that turns the overall strategic situation disadvantageous to the CCP regime, specifically making the CCP leadership fear for regime or personal survival. Now that's a long list, it's a very broad list, but what it really boils down to, and this shouldn't be surprising, is that it's all about the Chinese Communist Party regime and really the leadership. Anything that threatens them fundamentally, that is why they have nuclear weapons. And that is, in our view, when they're most likely to break their own declaratory policy and use them.

Deanna Lee

OK, so target selection is the single most important factor you wrote and you just described that, Nathan. So thank you. But before we get into some of the other recommendations, let's talk a little bit more about China's nuclear capabilities more broadly. Beijing's been expanding its nuclear force structure. So what do we know about that and what don't we know, maybe even just as important?

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga

Sure. We don't know a lot about Chinese nuclear force structure from China itself. We really rely on independent Western analysis of open source information from China and also public reports from the U.S. government to really learn a lot Chinese nuclear capabilities. What we do know is that even into the late 2010s, so just a couple of years ago, China was estimated to have somewhere in the low 200s amount of nuclear warheads, which for the size of the country and how developed its conventional capabilities were, were actually very low compared to other nuclear powers compared to the United States, compared to Russia. But China commenced on a large scale, rapid nuclear buildup, we estimate, roughly around 2019. And now the U.S. government has said that China probably has 600 operational nuclear warheads by the end of 2024. And the furthermore, U.S. government and Department of Defense has projected that China is gonna have over 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030 and this buildup will continue through at least 2035 so that within roughly 10 years, China is going to go from having roughly 200 nuclear weapons to a thousand nuclear weapons—five times as many nuclear weapons—and keep going. And so that really has driven a lot of attention. And this is all the more stark because the Chinese government has never really admitted it's actually expanding its nuclear forces and they never explained why they feel the need to expand its nuclear capabilities. And so, that's led to a lot of guessing, a lot of supposition, a lot of analysis. We also walked through in our report some of the leading explanations for that, but from a Chinese point of view, they have not actually explained why they're doing this.

Deanna Lee

It sounds like this rapid buildup which is going to continue is a large driver of what we talked about at the top of the show, why the U.S. needs to focus more on escalation management.

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga

Absolutely. That's really one of the key findings from our report, which Dahlia and I footstomp all the time, right? If the U.S. government, U.S. military and political leadership are serious about preparing for a potential conflict with China, they're seriously considering direct conflict with the Chinese military, then they have to accept the very serious risk of nuclear use. It is not something you can minimize and eliminate. You can do your best to minimize that risk, but you can't eliminate it. So we think that's a key point. We identified 17 different pathways that get you to Chinese nuclear first use. We're not trying to give you a quantitative probability about how likely any one of those are, but we simply argue that some of these could happen and all of these you want to avoid. So if you're gonna think about it seriously, then you have to accept it and do what you can to avoid any of these things happening.

Deanna Lee

Dahlia, please go ahead.

Dahlia Goldfeld

And some of the pathways are not things that the U.S. has direct influence over, obviously context matters, series of events matters. It's not that the U.S. would be not implicated at all in any of them, but we have one pathway where China's winning the war and they still choose to use it because they want to shape post-war dynamics. We have another one where they're really losing and they're gambling for resurrection. So, I mean. Maybe there's nothing that, this is our point, right?—there's nothing that can be done to drive the risk to zero. Someone ultimately is going to be winning and someone is going be losing. And again, we're not trying to say any probabilities of any of the pathways, but we do really want to hit home that probably the single most important message is, you cannot drive the risk of nuclear use to zero, this is a very real threat. And it's good to do research and try to be prepared and mitigate that risk ahead of time with good plans and sound judgment. But in the end, people are people and you can't control others' actions.

Deanna Lee

Now let's talk about some of the other ways to minimize that risk. Nathan already discussed those six actions with respect to target selection that the U.S. should avoid. Are there other specific actions the U.S. should avoid to minimize the risk of escalation with China?

Dahlia Goldfeld

Broadly speaking, we think target selection is the single biggest factor that the U.S. would have direct control over. But there are definitely other things that I think the U.S. can try to do. So one would be to manage perceptions as well as possible. So I'll give you a really funny-sounding example that could be something to keep in mind if you're a U.S. decisionmaker. If you have the ability to appear that you have, for example, 150 F-35s flying toward Quingdao Naval Base, but you actually maybe have two in the vicinity, well, 150 looks really scary, really provocative. Two, whole lot less so. This is an example where the U.S. can control what China is perceiving, right? How many they see flying toward them. And it may be operationally advantageous to look like you have 150 when you actually have two. But perhaps you then would be ratcheting up the temperature and escalating in a completely unnecessary way. You could just choose to be less effective at what you're doing at that moment in time. So that's an example, I think, where perceptions matter. And that's a specific example of what we mean when we say that. And I think Nathan wants to talk more about perceptions too. And another broad category in terms of trying to minimize the risk is to make nuclear use look less attractive. So there's different levels of nuclear use, right? I think a lot of times when people think about a nuclear war, they're thinking about this all out exchange where it's like China and America are just lobbying nuclear weapons at each other. Could that happen? Yes. Is that the most likely nuclear scenario? Probably not. Probably the most likely nuclear scenario is a very limited attack where a smaller scale or local attack occurs. One way that you can maybe help to make that less likely is to make it look less attractive to your adversary. So if you show through lots of open like training, lots of training documents on the internet, actual exercises that could be watched and making those very visible that show, hey, we are practicing and we are prepared to fight through nuclear contamination. And this is something that was practiced a ton during the Cold War and certainly has died down since then but doesn't mean it couldn't start again, then maybe the limited nuclear attack doesn't look so attractive because it's like, well, it's not gonna slow them down as much. It's not going to be as effective. You can try to build into your new systems as much nuclear and radiological hardening as possible to look like a less juicy target. And that's something that Air Force Global Strike Command could have direct control over because they're the ones that equip the Air Force with the Air Force's long-range strike systems. So those are a couple of other ideas.

Deanna Lee

Nathan, do you wanna talk a little bit more about Dahlia's point on misperceptions and potential dangerous perspectives between both sides?

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga

Absolutely. So, a lot of the time we say that deterrence is in the eye of the beholder. For perception, it's the same thing. I can't fix Chinese perceptions just by telling them they should think this way or that way or not believe this or that. As a China analyst, my job is to understand how the Chinese government might think about X, Y, or Z. And try to help U.S. government and U.S. decisionmakers account for that Chinese perception. We think as we were working through the 17 different pathways we identified in our research, we're quite struck by the fact that a lot of these pathways involve misperception, that the U.S. is not intentionally going out and doing X, Y, or Z. It's that China misperceives, mistakenly believes the U.S. is trying to do X, Y, or Z. So, for those six most likely triggers we talked about for Chinese nuclear use, the important thing to remember is it's not just the U.S. actually going out and striking any of those targets on the Chinese mainland. The risk is also simply that the Chinese government and Chinese military misperceive a U.S. intent to do that, which really raises the bar for how much the U. S. government and U.S. military have to be attuned to these potential Chinese misperceptions. So I'll highlight two specific pathways that really center on misperceptions and those escalation risks. So the first one is that China holds what we call a divergent view of the U.S. theory of victory. This means that Chinese government has a different understanding of how the U.S. plans to win the war. So, the idea here is that U.S. conventional strikes around intended from a U.S. perspective to degrade Chinese conventional military operations, but are instead interpreted by Chinese officials as an attempt to decapitate the CCP leadership because they're around Beijing, where the Chinese leadership is, leading Beijing, leading China to escalate to nuclear first use. So that's a misperception. In our pathway, in our vignettes, the U.S. military was not actually trying to decapitate the Chinese leadership. But Chinese officials wrongly interpreted U.S. intents and decided, oh, they're going after our leadership. Oh, we have to respond. Oh, we have to use nuclear weapons first. That's something we want to avoid. The second pathway I'll mention is divergent perceptions of U.S. forces involved. So reasoning that the United States would commit the expensive nuclear-capable B-21 bomber only if the U.S. was committed to maximalist political objectives. Chinese leaders escalate to nuclear use because they perceive a threat to their regime survival. In this vignette, it's not even the activity that really matters. It's the Chinese perception that the B- 21 is very precious or very important to the U.S. military, U.S. government. And so by the fact of merely involving it in the conflict, using it in some way, flying it in some way, the Chinese leadership concludes, wrongly, that the U.S. is all-in on the conflict and wants to overthrow the regime. Again, it's that mismatch of perceptions, misunderstanding U.S. intent versus Chinese assumptions about what the U.S. is trying to do. There are no simple answers to solving these potential problems, but we think it's important to highlight the possibility and work through how can you minimize that risk.

Dahlia Goldfeld

And in terms of trying to link this all to long-range strike, I think that the perceptions and misperceptions issue leads to a very important little nugget, which is that you want to try to be seen by your adversary, in this case China, with less escalation intent, right? And what a series of war games showed was that less-escalatory basically equaled denial of the Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan. So literally trying to stop the invasion from landing on the Taiwanese island and having the entire fight over the water was far less escalatory in these war games than other actions. What does that require? That requires being able to successfully intercept these maritime vessels, right? Ships. And it's also advantageous to the U.S. to be able to fight themselves from a standoff distance, from far away from the Strait of Taiwan. So there's a certain irony here, I admit, to this idea and to this recommendation. But in some ways, having more long-range strike that's effective against the least escalatory instantiation of this war, if you will, might actually be stabilizing. And I know that sounds weird. It's like, oh, let's buy more dangerous long-range, scary long-range strike to stabilize the situation. But I think the idea that we're trying to give is that more options is actually better. You want to be able to fight from further away. You want be able have the option to do what appears to be the least escalatory action at any given moment in time. And we do think there is a role for long-range strike there, because long-range strike weapons can be you know, detonated at a distance by definition. And if they can successfully prosecute the right targets, that might be inherently stabilizing and not force the U.S. then to look for other types of missions or operations to achieve similar objectives. So for example, you might say, oh, it could be very effective to take out this one fire control radar or some other command and control node that's on the mainland. But that might be very escalatory or perceived as more escalatory than trying to take out all of the systems that that fire control radar or other C2 system are controlling. And it's gonna be a lot harder because in the latter case, you have to intercept, I don't know, 16 systems or whatever it might be. And therefore will require more U.S. long-range strike. But it could actually be less escalatory to do it that way. And that really gets back to that trade-off triangle where you're gonna take a harder operational path in the name of reducing escalation.

Deanna Lee

Dahlia, you mentioned denial, and I want to ask specifically about that concept. The research here is titled Denial Without Disaster, but that concept has a specific meaning. Can you just give us a quick overview of it?

Dahlia Goldfeld

Sure. So the pathways that we talked about so far, they're kind of independent of your overall theory of victory or your overall choice of how you want to prosecute the conflict. Many of these pathways could exist in different theory of victory domains. But past RAND research was looking at the link between theory of victory, and escalation as a more isolated question. And essentially, they found that denial, or basically stopping China from ever getting to Taiwan, denying their entire attack in the Strait of Taiwan, that's what we mean, stopping it there, is the least escalatory option, as opposed to the other dominant plausible option, which is cost imposition, which basically means that you try to hit Chinese targets in a way that's effective and hurts, but not too much so you don't get nuclear retaliation. We don't want to say that this is impossible or that you could never strike a target on the mainland, but the basic idea is that's probably more escalatory. It's probably going to ratchet up your temperature. You don't wanna do that. It's hard to know. What the line in the sand might be that causes that retaliation. I think anyone who claims to know what targets or how many would lead to nuclear use is wrong. No one knows. I'm sure it's a moving thing, a moving line in the sand anyway, but overall that the denial strategy is a much better one and therefore we focus on that.

Deanna Lee

In thinking a little bit more about this idea of misperceptions and the potential danger of that, you know, obviously, China is going to be assessing U.S. perceptions as well. And that could potentially affect how the conflict spirals or not. So I'm wondering, and you the U.S. must learn to live with Chinese nuclear signaling. So how can the U.S. manage its own perceptions in that regard and why is it important to keep that in mind?

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga

Right. So in our research, we identified a very clear, distinct Chinese military approach to deterrent signaling, including nuclear signaling. And it appears to be a very common approach in a high-end crisis or a conflict. So we think that the U.S. government, U.S. military, need to prepare for the potential that China might use its growing nuclear capabilities for signaling, even if hopefully short of actual use. We also identified Chinese writings that ascribed a very high utility or high benefit to Russia for Putin's brandishing of nuclear weapons for its war with Ukraine. So we think that there is pre-existing Chinese military doctrine on nuclear signaling and these views were probably very much reinforced by lessons that Beijing drew of the benefits of nuclear signaling for Russia in the war with Ukraine. This doesn't mean that the U.S. government has to like Chinese nuclear signaling. Doesn't mean they have to welcome it, but we think it is probably unavoidable. It's probably very difficult to convince Chinese leadership to do no signaling whatsoever. And so then the question becomes, well, if you can't stop it, what should you do about it? Right, and so in our report, we obviously argue that, well, DoD can think now about how it should prepare and how it might respond. And one of our concluding recommendations is to say the U.S. government should think through what types of Chinese nuclear signaling actually merit, require a U.S. response, and what types the Chinese nuclear signaling can the United States downplay or even just ignore because we have an extremely robust nuclear capability that is very survivable. And so signaling can serve multiple purposes, true, but we're always going to have a nuclear retaliatory capability and that's the backstop of nuclear deterrence. And so there may be an opportunity for the U.S. government to lower some of these escalatory risks from Chinese behavior for things that are under our control. And we just think it's good for the U.S. government to think through some of those options now.

Deanna Lee

As a layperson, I find myself wondering, even though it's very clear that preparing for a scenario like this is essential, does the preparation by its very nature contribute to heightened risk at all as well? Does it further ratchet up tensions with China?

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga

So I think this is also something both we as researchers and folks in U.S. government are very conscious of, right? Ultimately, clearly the U.S. government, the U.S. military's should opt to prepare for all potentialities, prepare for these potential conflicts. But really, as you said, the job is to not make things worse. And so Dahlia talked through all these different ways during conflict, you could try to avoid triggering Chinese perception or misperception of U.S. activities. I would also add that even in peacetime before a conflict starts—so today—we talked through in the report, several different ways that you could adjust or account for different parts of U.S. training to reduce the risk of driving Chinese misperceptions even before a conflict starts. So for example, don't train for doing decapitation against the Chinese leadership if you're not going to do it in a conflict because you don't want to trigger or exacerbate Chinese misperceptions today in the lead-up to a conflict. There are certainly things that the U.S. military can be thinking through about how to not make things worse and how to account for some of those potential Chinese perceptions.

Deanna Lee

Before we go, I have one final question. After conducting this analysis, what are you most concerned about? And then on the flip side, did you learn anything in this study that made you more hopeful for the future?

Dahlia Goldfeld

Well, I think at its core, uh, this is about, you know, human beings and human nature is a tricky, a tricky thing and you can't control other people. And even though we're supposed to learn it as toddlers and little kids, restraint is actually really difficult, right? If you want to do something, it can be hard to stop yourself. And as our research shows, there are a lot of reasons that someone may lose their restraint and choose to go nuclear, so to speak. I don't know that my research was very hopeful. Nathan may have a slightly different opinion there. But I do think that people don't want nuclear war. I don't think they want to see the consequences of radiation and just the panic that would ensue and the misery that would ensure. And I think that that's ultimately going to be the biggest deterrent of all, is that just people don't want it. And I hope that is such a fundamental desire to not see that kind of suffering and would help in the very difficult-to-achieve sometimes but necessary human restraint. So I would leave it at that.

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga

So I'll close it on two optimistic notes. One is from a research perspective, I was very happy that this project that Dahlia and I led hopefully can help provide new insights, better understanding, perhaps identify some specific risks that the U.S. military and U.S. decisionmakers can try to avoid from triggering Chinese nuclear first use. And thus hopefully, if this hypothetical conflict ever does come to pass, reduce, by even just a little bit, the risks of this rising to catastrophic escalation and nuclear strikes on homelands. It's absolutely something we want to avoid. And so hopefully this research will do a little bit in reducing that risk. And then second, looking at the big picture political leadership from both United States and China. Then-President Biden and Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping promised twice in the last several years that nuclear war should not be fought and can't be won. I think it's very positive that amidst all of the tensions and acrimony in the U.S.-China relationship, that the political leadership when they do get together can at least agree on a couple things. And one of those things being we don't want nuclear war and we both agree that it's not winnable. I think that should be optimistic that, from the top leadership perspective, there is agreement this is not something we want to see, that both sides should work to reduce the risks of a nuclear conflict.

Deanna Lee

Thank you. It's not always easy to end on an optimistic note, but we like to try, so really appreciate both of you making those very good points. I think that's all the time we have for today. Dahlia and Nathan, thank you so much for being here and discussing your research with us. We really appreciate it.

Dahlia Goldfeld

Thanks.

Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga

Thanks for having us.

Deanna Lee

Thanks for listening. To learn more about the research we discussed in today's episode, go to rand.org/policyminded. This episode was produced by me, Deanna Lee. It was recorded by me, Evan Banks, and Harper Rupert. Evan Banks edited today's episode, and RAND's Director of Digital Outreach is Pete Wilmoth. We'll see you next time. RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.