Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present:

volume of China’s GDP, dynamics of its economic development and the number of the country’spopulation have already become a weighty political and military factor of the world development;in addition to that, China has made considerable progress in development of its general-purposeforces. It is possible to note that during this decade China has been still very cautious and accuratein building up its strategic nuclear capability, rather choosing to develop its general-purposeassets and forces within the group that is primarily focused on Taiwan.While developing plans and carrying out activities in the political-military and military-strategicspheres, China has to more and more come out of the shadow of the still remaining U.S.-Russiancentral strategic cooperation that was developed based on the cooperation between two superpowers—theSoviet Union and the United States.Thereby development of the missile defense system in the United States has more and more relationto China. Due to their small size, China’s strategic nuclear forces (SNF) are more sensitiveto the ABM factor than Russia’s SNF, which, despite the considerable reduction of the numberof carriers and warheads with delivery vehicles, are still comparable to the U.S. SNF. China willapparently have to start building its own missile warning system (MWS), which it practically hasnot had for a long time, at least in the form that is comparable to the MWS of the United Statesand Russia. As to missile defense, the situation is much more complicated. The most complicatedaspect of missile defense systems is the system integration of strike, information and commandcomponents into a single functioning complex, as well as solution of a number of intricate scientific-technicalproblems related to separate components of the system—radar stations, antimissilesof various ranges, and computer complexes, including software—which were alreadymentioned above, when we talked about development of the missile defense systems in the USSR(Russian Federation) and the United States. Thus, technically China is more prepared for a breakthroughin deployment of its strategic offensive forces than for development of its ballistic missiledefense (BMD) system. (It should be recalled that even such technically advanced countries asFrance and Great Britain at their time decided not to further their work on development of theirmissile defense systems. Neither France, nor Great Britain had developed their own MWS either.)India, which is breathing down China’s neck, is currently in a stronger position than China from apolitical and political-military point of view, because the United States and its allies practically donot see India as a state that is able to throw a challenge to currently the only superpower. Moreover,Washington recurrently tries to use India as a counterpoise to China (and to a certain extentto Russia).In order to keep India as a great power, which plays nearly a primary role in securing the Asia-Pacificand the global balance of forces that is needful for the United States, Washington has agreedto unprecedented U.S.-India relations in the area of civil nuclear-power engineering, which are atvariance with the previously declared principles of the U.S. policy in the area of non-proliferationof nuclear weapons. 104The most probable line of conduct of China’s leadership in the coming several years will be demonstrationof technical capabilities to break through the U.S. perspective missile defense systemsand enhancement of combat stability of its SNF group (including its transition from the ICBMmonad to the ICBM-SLBM dyad). In doing so China’s leadership will probably carefully monitorthe implementation of plans of development of all types of missile defense systems—on the terri-52Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present: Theoretical and Applied Questions