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China has been fielding over 600 operational nuclear warheads since mid-2024, up from about 500 last year, according to an estimate by the Pentagon.
That reported growth puts Beijing on track to hit 1,000 warheads by 2030, a prediction that US defense officials made in 2021.
Those findings come from the Defense Department's 2024 China Military Power Report, an annual summary of Beijing's capabilities and an assessment of its ambitions for its armed forces.
The Pentagon says China isn't just making more warheads — it's building a wide array of capabilities to launch them, too.
"When you look at what they're trying to build here, it's a diversified nuclear force that would be comprised of systems ranging from low yield, precision strike missiles, all the way up to ICBMs with different options at basically every rung on the escalation ladder," a senior defense official told reporters at a briefing on Monday. ICBMs refer to intercontinental ballistic missiles.
"Which is a lot different than what they've relied on traditionally," the official added.
China says it maintains a "no first-use" nuclear policy, meaning it will only ever deploy a nuke in retaliation for another nuclear strike.
But the US has been startled by what it says is a rapid build-up of Beijing's nuclear forces in the last few years. In 2020, the Pentagon thought that China had only 200 nukes and would have 400 by 2030.
The Defense Department's newer estimate of 1,000 warheads by 2030 would put China closer to being a peer threat to the US and Russia, the two behemoths of the Cold War.
A strategic treaty between the US and Russia limits their active arsenals to 1,550 warheads, though they are stockpiling thousands more.
Now, Western arms analysts are concerned that China isn't engaging in talks about its nuclear build-up — a key mechanism that the US and Russia used to prevent nuclear war.
"The PRC has not publicly or formally acknowledged or explained its nuclear expansion and modernization," the 2024 report said.
Meanwhile, a debate is raging in Washington about a need for the US to expand and explore more advanced nuke launch methods so it can maintain an edge over China.
The Pentagon's report for 2024 said Beijing is likely developing advanced missile systems "in part due to long-term concerns about United States missile defense capabilities."
These include hypersonic glide vehicles, which use the edge of Earth's upper atmosphere to fly incredibly fast, and fractional orbital bombardments, which launch weapons into orbital space to extend their range and flight time.
Those technologies can make a nuclear strike difficult to detect or track. In mid-2021, China is believed to have combined them in a hypersonic missile test.
For the US, expanding on nuclear weapons will cost taxpayers, a point that arms control advocates often raise when asking for restraint. An already-approved program to modernize America's aging nuclear triad is expected to cost $1.5 trillion over the next 30 years.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
