The first two waves of Iranian strikes in retaliation for Operation Rising Lion rained 150 ballistic missiles on the skies above Israel. The next waves consisted of just tens of missiles. In the backdrop of Israeli and later U.S. attacks against Iranian nuclear facilities, Tel Aviv methodically executed a remarkable campaign to destroy Iran’s mobile missile launchers and storage sites, blunting Tehran’s ballistic missile capabilities in the process. Observers have already argued these attacks show the limits of Iranian missile strategy, but nuclear planners ought to worry that Iran’s troubles could have broader implications. Recent evidence of how advanced militaries might target strategic forces will challenge the force planning decisions of nuclear states, particularly the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Despite its unprecedented nuclear buildup, the PRC’s near-term nuclear force posture remains more reliant on mobile intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launchers and significantly less survivable than policymakers might expect. Strategic Forces Under Attack The circumstances under which a state would undertake preemptive, damage-limiting strikes against an adversary nuclear force are so extreme that scholarship has been overly reliant on a few examples. Scholars have leaned heavily on the difficulties U.S. pilots encountered hunting Iraqi Scud launchers in the 1991 Gulf War, or modeled remote sensing coverage to highlight detection challenges. However, Austin Long and Brendan Rittenhouse Green argued in 2014 that the intelligence environment and stakes for the Scud hunt differed significantly from how strategic forces would be targeted. Operation Rising Lion offers a closer example. Tel Aviv, facing significantly higher stakes, fully integrated asymmetric capabilities and intelligence infiltration of the Iranian military enterprise with precision strike capabilities. Having engaged in years of intelligence preparation, including smuggling of striking drones into Iran, Israel claims to have destroyed 120 launchers, or one-third of Iran’s prewar force, and prevented Tehran from executing a planned 1,000-missile barrage. Ukraine’s spectacular Operation Spider Web attack against Russian nuclear-capable heavy bombers provides further evidence of strategic force vulnerabilities in the information age. The Ukrainian Security Service planned a covert operation over 18 months to hide and launch small, striking drones from cargo trucks. Among the 40 aircraft successfully targeted were Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 strategic bombers that Russia will struggle to replace; at Russia’s poor readiness levels, experts estimate Ukraine may have damaged or destroyed up to 70 percent of Moscow’s operational strategic bombers. The combination of scale and precision employed by Israel and Ukraine against unhardened, expensive strategic forces signals that the bar for survivability is becoming harder to meet. China Continues to Have a Force Survivability Problem At first glance, the unprecedented expansion of PRC nuclear forces should exclude Beijing from this conversation. The sheer scale of PRC ICBM silo construction—350 new launchers by the 2030s—has led experts to argue for drivers ranging from the pursuit of great power status detached from technical objectives to ambitions of nuclear superiority. Despite siloed ICBMs being a poor choice for enhancing survivability against a disarming first strike, the desire for greater survivability remains consistent in PRC writings and observable force development indicators. PRC thinking on deterrence still reflects a desire to achieve “asymmetric strategic stability” while retaining its longstanding nuclear no first use (NFU) policy. In the PRC’s view, strategic stability could be maintained even under NFU provided that its nuclear forces could withstand a comprehensive nuclear first strike and then retaliate, thereby creating mutual vulnerability. However, despite also leaning on non-nuclear strategic capabilities such as offensive cyber and precision conventional missiles, PRC strategists have expressed growing concerns about the vulnerability of China’s nuclear forces to U.S. non-nuclear capabilities. China’s rushed force structure validates these concerns to an alarming extent. Calculations of a disarming U.S. strike against current and notional 2035 PRC nuclear forces based on a model developed in 2020 by Wu Riqiang demonstrate that the PRC’s retaliatory (also known as second-strike) force remains quite small. A Nuclear Triad in Name Only China has deployed a nuclear triad, but it remains far less effective than U.S. or Russian equivalents. To rapidly expand its nuclear forces, China invested heavily in building new ICBM silos, including three silo fields for solid-fuel DF-31-class ICBMs. Fixed ICBM silos are difficult to disguise. Given that non-governmental organizations identified them with commercial satellite imagery, Beijing should expect their silos to be targetable. If struck by highly accurate U.S. nuclear forces, the PRC should not currently expect any of its silos to survive (see figure 1 below). Figure 1: Impact of U.S. Counterforce Strike on 2025 and 2035 PRC ICBM Silos NOTE: Figure 1 simulates the result of a U.S. counterforce strike against PRC ICBM silos using either type of U.S. submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead. Accuracies and silo hardness are based on prior studies referenced, and the model assumes that half of the 2035 ICBMs are pre-mated with nuclear warheads in peacetime. The quantitative model also demonstrates that even if the PRC departs from its current posture and fully loads its new silo fields with pre-mated ICBMs over the next decade, no more than 2 to 3 ICBMs are expected to survive a first strike. Technical studies have shown that U.S. cruise missiles, designed for high accuracy even under GPS-jamming, could achieve similarly lethal results. Unless the PRC adopts a mature launch-under-attack posture and deploys a more robust early-warning system—it currently has just 3 early-warning satellites in orbit—these silos may raise the bar for a preemptive U.S. attack but don’t meaningfully enhance PRC second strike capability. China’s sea-based deterrent is likely not survivable either. The PRC continually deploys one of its six Type 094 nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) on at-sea deterrence patrols, but the Type 094 remains two magnitudes noisier than its U.S. and Russian counterparts. In a crisis, U.S. and allied anti-submarine warfare capabilities would likely confine PRC SSBNs to safe bastions from which even China’s new JL-3 submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) can’t reach most of the U.S. homeland. The air leg of China’s “triad” consists of a few H-6 bombers modified to carry air-launched ballistic missiles that may be nuclear-capable. However, until the PRC’s H-20 stealth bomber enters service with a viable nuclear payload, it lacks the “high-performance aircraft” needed to strike the United States. This leaves the PRC’s mobile missile force. Riqiang’s model, which assumes that the PRC would disperse its mobile ICBMs to underground forward sites in a crisis, provides multiple opportunities for U.S. intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities to detect these launchers. Fixed garrisons that house mobile ICBMs in peacetime are highly vulnerable. As for the forward sites, the U.S. has shown its ability to target and deny access to hardened, deeply buried sites using conventional weapons. Figure 2: Impact of U.S. Counterforce Strike on 2025 and 2035 PRC Mobile ICBMs NOTE: Figure 2 simulates the result of a U.S. counterforce strike against PRC mobile ICBMs based on detection probabilities derived from Riqiang’s 2020 study. Force sizing for 2035 assumes that all brigades currently deployed or in development are equipped with a full complement of launchers. Figure 2 demonstrates that the PRC’s peacetime mobile ICBM survivability will remain very low unless the PLA Rocket Force makes significant changes to its dispersal practices. PRC mobile ICBM survivability on high alert status proves markedly better, but not reassuringly so. Provided that U.S. ISR continues to improve and Beijing retains conservative assumptions about warhead reliability, a U.S. counterforce strike in the 2030s could attrit even a considerably larger PRC force on high alert to at most 22 launchers with less than 30 functioning warheads. Though 30 warheads, each with a 425-kiloton yield, would be devastating against American cities, this attack size is well within the range of “limited” ballistic missile threats that advocates of improved homeland missile defenses believe future systems should work toward successfully intercepting. Thus, relative to the size of its nuclear buildup, China has not substantially improved its retaliatory capability. It would nonetheless be dangerous for the U.S. to attempt to exploit this advantage. The most glaring problem comes from the challenge of deterring two large nuclear arsenals. Assuming the U.S. must hold half its deployed arsenal in reserve against Russia, a counterforce attack against China would expend too many warheads. Stand-off conventional capabilities such as Tomahawk and JASSM cruise missiles would need to be used in conjunction with nuclear forces. These same capabilities may already be depleted in a U.S.-China conflict and lack the range to hit silo fields deep inside China. Air superiority, a prerequisite for enabling conventionally-armed aircraft or drones to “dwell” in a target area until a mobile target is detected, also cannot be assured in a U.S.-China war. Thus, despite the successes evidenced by Rising Lion and Spider Web, damage limitation remains a very difficult mission. Implications for Strategic Stability Nuclear-armed states face an increasing array of threats to their strategic forces and should be expected to respond accordingly. Fortunately, the PRC’s survivability problem principally results from its unique force structure decisions and not a sign that all nuclear forces are vulnerable. Sustained U.S. investment in developing highly lethal nuclear weapons creates particularly challenging technical obstacles for adversaries to overcome. The PRC might hope that a large ICBM force, combined with non-nuclear strategic capabilities, can temporarily offset qualitative weaknesses that are slower to fix. China’s survivability issues also lend further credence to arguments that PRC nuclear behavior has multiple, often conflictual drivers while showing that claims of Chinese nuclear superiority are still far-fetched. Washington’s lack of mutual vulnerability with China raises political hurdles for engaging in arms control and strategic stability. The PRC has already decried the Golden Dome as further evidence that the U.S. seeks to achieve “absolute security.” In the aftermath of Operation Rising Lion, the PRC may express even greater suspicion about new regional precision strike capabilities fielded by the U.S. and its allies. Additionally, the PRC could remain highly reticent about arms control until it reaches not only numerical, but greater qualitative parity with the deployed U.S. nuclear arsenal. Asymmetric and conventional threats to strategic forces may also create some opportunities for reassurance. Improvements to air and missile defense could be focused on enhancing U.S. ICBM survivability by deploying terminal-phase interceptors with limited area coverage suitable only to protect nuclear forces. Moreover, Operation Spider Web has highlighted the severe lack of active and passive defenses for vulnerable U.S. strategic bombers. Investments in resilient supporting infrastructure for these bombers would likewise be stabilizing: they enhance survivability while having no utility against a PRC second strike targeted at cities. Ultimately, the U.S.-China nuclear balance will remain far more dynamic than a simple numbers game.