China’s Submarines Going Nuclear, Challenging American Supremacy Across the Pacific

The Chinese are catching up in “the undersea superiority” needed to combat American naval forces in the Pacific, warns the influential Seoul-based Asia Pacific Leadership Network. China’s “improving capabilities in submarine warfare could increasingly challenge” the American submarine fleet, long the world’s leader, according to APLN, a network of experts from 26 countries.“U.S. submarines currently maintain advantages in armament, endurance, and fleet size,” APLN surmises, but China’s fleet “is growing rapidly.” The Chinese threat, it says, highlights “the importance of continued investment in shipbuilding capacity.”America and South Korea are both attempting to answer the challenge.An American military technology company, Anduril Industries, is taking over a massive site at Baltimore harbor for building nuclear submarines. The company, based in Costa Mesa, California, has promised to invest $3.3 billion into a complex once occupied by Bethlehem Steel. Anduril also counts on another $2.9 billion in contracts with the navy.President Trump, announcing the plan, said it would be “a state-of-the-art shipyard” — one of the world’s “biggest and most significant” — for “next-generation” Virginia class nuclear subs.It will not be until the 2030s, however, that Anduril will be able to produce submarines. The company’s subsidiary, Defense One, will break ground on the site next year, begin manufacturing in 2030 and launch its first sub several years later.Up the east coast in Philadelphia, one of Korea’s leading shipbuilders, Hanwha Ocean, has acquired the Philly Shipyard, now the Hanwha Philly Shipyard, which Mr. Trump sees as also reviving America’s ship-building industry. Hanwha Philly, he said, would produce nuclear submarines.Analysts, however, discount talk of Hanwha producing submarines, whether nuclear or old-fashioned diesel, any time soon.“The Philadelphia yard will not yet be building any submarines — let alone nuclear submarines,” writes Lyle Goldstein at the U.S. Naval Institute. “It is much too difficult from an industrial and technological standpoint,” and “it would likely take up to two decades before any nuclear submarines could be completed there.”But what about Japan, an industrial powerhouse that China accuses of rearming under its right-leaning prime minister, Sanae Takaichi?Japan’s defense minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, pleads the case. “The environment surrounding Japan has become so severe,” he has said, “that we must discuss whether to continue with diesel or switch to nuclear power.”Japanese officials are mulling the nuclear submarine option despite public aversion to nuclear weaponry of any kind in the long aftermath of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that led to Japan’s surrender in World War II.“Japan weighs considering nuclear-powered subs in updated security policies,” headlines Nikkei Asia, an English-language offshoot of Japan’s huge financial daily, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, “but domestic obstacles remain.”The Chinese if anything would be far more disturbed than ordinary Japanese by the prospect of Tokyo collaborating with Washington on nuclear submarines.“Beijing would see a similar movement by Japan’s maritime forces as a grave threat,” writes Mr. Goldstein. A Shanghai-based strategist, he says, told him that China “would likely answer this new partnership by doubling down on its own nuclear submarine outlays, including in collaboration with Russia.”In the Pacific arms race, nuclear submarines may ultimately be more significant than surface vessels. Including aircraft carriers, as the cutting edge of naval power. ALPN says Australia’s quest for nuclear submarines in alliance with its AUKUS partners, America and Britain, along with South Korea’s development of nuclear subs and China’s “expanding nuclear-powered submarine fleet,” are “reshaping the regional security environment,”These developments, says ALPN, “warrant closer attention not only to traditional military competition and nuclear deterrence but also to emerging technological, environmental, and nuclear non-proliferation challenges.”The American navy, with more than 60 submarines, all nuclear powered, “retains an advantage,” says APLN. but China, with about 60 submarines, most of them diesel-powered, “is narrowing the gap” while increasing ““the risks of unintended nuclear escalation.”The Chinese fleet “is executing a significant strategic shift from diesel-electric to all-nuclear construction,” the American navy’s chief of intelligence, Rear Admiral Mike Brookes, has told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Within the next decade, he predicts, the Chinese will boast 80 submarines. Half of them, he said, will be nuclear, capable of diving deeper, staying underwater longer, heightening the Chinese threat across the Pacific.

China’s Submarines Going Nuclear, Challenging American Supremacy Across the Pacific

China’s Submarines Going Nuclear, Challenging American Supremacy Across the Pacific

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