China says its fastest-growing nuclear stockpile remains at minimum level required

Beijing: China has asserted that its rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal — generating over 100 warheads annually and now totaling around 600 — remains at the minimum level required, downplaying concerns that it is engaged in a nuclear arms race with the US and Russia to match their stockpiles by the end of the decade.

Beijing has added 100 more warheads to its nuclear stockpile each year since 2023. It currently holds at least 600 warheads, and that number is expected to “keep growing over the coming decade”, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Yearbook 2025, released by the Swedish think tank on Monday.

“China … has the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world,” the report said. While most of these warheads are thought to be stored separately from their launchers, China could be deploying a small number of missiles, as is done on a much larger scale by the US. According to SIPRI’s estimate, 132 of the warheads have been assigned to launchers that are still being loaded.

According to observers, China’s growing stockpile has implications for India as Beijing's close ally, Pakistan, too, is accelerating its nuclear weapons programme.

When asked for his reaction to the SIPRI report, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told a media briefing on Monday that China has no comment to make on the report.

Guo reiterated that China has always adhered to a nuclear strategy of self-defence and maintains its nuclear capabilities at the minimum level required for national security, without engaging in any arms race.

China strictly follows the policy of no-first use of nuclear weapons at any time under any circumstances and doesn't threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, he said.

Analysts say the reason why China is speeding up its nuclear and missile programme is to become a world-class military power.

There could be several factors behind the rapid warhead build-up, including President Xi Jinping’s call that China “must be a world-class military power by the middle of the century”, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post quoted Hans Kristensen, an associate senior fellow at SIPRI and director of the Federation of American Scientists’ nuclear information project, as saying.

“[There could have been] an apparent decision that the previous minimum deterrent was insufficient to deter potential adversaries, and possibly a conclusion that increasingly capable US missile defence systems could reduce the effectiveness of the Chinese retaliatory capability,” Kristensen said.

The report said as of January, China had completed or was close to completing around 350 new ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) silos in three large desert fields in its north and three mountainous areas in the east. However, it remained unclear as of that date as to whether any of these ICBM units had begun combat duty.

“Depending on how it decides to structure its forces, China could potentially have at least as many ICBMs as either Russia or the USA by the turn of the decade, although its stockpile of nuclear warheads is still expected to remain much smaller than the stockpiles of either of those two countries,” SIPRI said.

Kristensen said once loaded and armed, the additional ICBM silos “clearly provide significant additional destructive power that China could inflict on the United States”.

If China eventually filled each of its new silos under construction with a single-warhead missile, it would have the capacity to deploy around 650 warheads on its ICBMs within another decade, but if each silo were filled with a missile equipped with three MIRVs, this number could rise to more than 1,200 warheads, the Post quoted the SIPRI report.

The rise in the number of states with multiple-warhead programmes could potentially lead to a “rapid increase in deployed warheads” and allow nuclear-armed states, especially China, to “threaten the destruction of significantly more targets”, it added.

China is in the “middle of a significant modernisation and expansion of its nuclear arsenal”, according to SIPRI, where it is refitting its Type 094 ballistic missile submarines or SSBNs (submersible ship, ballistic, nuclear) with longer-range missiles while also developing a new Type 096 SSBN and strategic bomber aircraft.

While speeding up its nuclear arsenal, China declines the US calls to join it and Russia to renew the Strategic Offensive Arms treaty (START), which expires next February.

The treaty calls for halving the number of strategic nuclear missile launchers. In his introduction to the yearbook, SIPRI director Dan Smith warned about the challenges facing nuclear arms control and the prospects of a new nuclear arms race.

“Bilateral nuclear arms control between Russia and the USA entered crisis some years ago and is now almost over,” Smith said, pointing to the lack of any signs of negotiations to renew or replace the New START treaty.