China, Power & Security, United States Pentagon rattled by Chinese military push on multiple fronts

Perry World House Faculty Fellow Fiona Cunningham comments on China's increasing military strength for AP.

China’s growing military muscle and its drive to end American predominance in the Asia-Pacific is rattling the U.S. defense establishment. American officials see trouble quickly accumulating on multiple fronts — Beijing’s expanding nuclear arsenal, its advances in space, cyber and missile technologies, and threats to Taiwan ...

Fiona Cunningham, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a specialist in Chinese military strategy, says a key driver of Beijing’s nuclear push is its concerns about U.S. intentions.

“I don’t think China’s nuclear modernization is giving it a capability to pre-emptively strike the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and that was a really important generator of competition during the Cold War,” Cunningham said in an online forum sponsored by Georgetown University. “But what it does do is to limit the effectiveness of U.S. attempts to pre-emptively strike the Chinese arsenal.”

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