SUMMARY

In this episode, Fiona Cunningham describes the origins of China’s NC3 system and its primary role in supporting China’s land-based missile force. She outlines recent developments including mobility, “informatization” and automation of parts of the NC3 system, pending deployment of nuclear missile submarines, early warning systems, evolving organizational structure, and cultural factors that shape China’s NC3 system and its orientation towards negative versus positive control.

This podcast is accompanied by Fiona Cunningham’s paper “Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications Systems of the People’s Republic of China.”

The Fourth Leg is a series of podcasts focused on one of the most complex systems in the world today – nuclear command and control – and its increasingly complicated future. Within this series we go straight to the experts, across multiple sectors, to discuss the modernization of nuclear command and control systems.
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Along with colleagues from the Nautilus Institute and the Preventive Defense Project, IST recently hosted over 50 international experts at Stanford University to anticipate technical challenges that will arise from the modernization of complex nuclear command and control systems. We aim to spotlight some of the vulnerabilities within a modernized NC3 system while furthering the conversation with this series.

​Keep an eye on IST, as we will begin additional podcast series in the coming months focused on how to fix the internet, AI and global stability, and other critical tech and security issues- for now, we have so much more to talk about, so let’s get started.