Floating Nuclear Reactors:
An Imperialistic and Dangerous Strategy

By Col Dencio S. Acop (Ret), PhD | Date 05-15-2024

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — As if the danger posed by the weaponization of nuclear power was not enough, today the world is seeing the potential expansion of this nuclear danger through its deployment in the maritime zones. Let it be known that China’s confidence in its imperialism in the South China Sea is significantly based upon the deployment of floating nuclear power which the United States and other nuclear powers will be hesitant to target. 

This literary discusses three points in this regard. First, China sees deploying nuclear power across the South China Sea as essential for its successful imperialism in the hotly contested maritime area. Second, the successful deployment of nuclear reactors in the South China Sea will solidify China’s Ten Dash Line claim practically expanding Chinese territory as if the South China Sea is not maritime but Chinese land. Third, this ‘might is right’ strategy of China will necessitate a hardline response from opposing world nuclear leaders that could bring about World War III.

Let us discuss these in detail. First, the deployment of nuclear power across the South China Sea has been strategized by the Chinese Communist Party as essential to China’s goal to add the hotly contested maritime area to the Chinese empire. 

It has not been clear up until now but this planned deployment is both revolutionary and a key success factor in China’s quest to dominate the Asia-Pacific region in general and the South China Sea in particular. Until this revelation, it was deemed implausible for any country to possess the capability to dominate an entire sea as its territory. 

So, this future scenario was the understanding arrived at between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin around the time Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In that meeting, both leaders announced before the world their ‘no limits’ partnership’. 

Today, it is revealed that their understanding meant Russia’s export of its floating nuclear reactor capability to China. Russia may not be the economic world leader that China and the United States are, but the nuclear field is its key strength. 

According to the Washington Post and Asia Times, it is only Russia that currently ‘operates a floating nuclear reactor, known as Akademik Lomonosov, launched in 2019’. The floater ‘is powered by two KLT-40S reactors aboard Russian nuclear icebreakers and two steam turbines.’ The China-Russia collaboration in this regard is being brought to fruition by Russia’s Rosatom Overseas and China National Nuclear Cooperation which signed a Memorandum of Intent as early as 2014. 

In 2017, CNNC announced ‘plans to construct as many as 20 floating nuclear plants in the South China Sea’. However, floating nuclear plants are not without their inherent risks. First of all, they are revolutionary and as such are yet unregulated by international standards. Unlike land-based plants, floating ones are subject to acts of God, natural events, as well as to man-made errors. 

The possible leak of radioactive material into the air and water could contaminate and endanger human health. And unlike submarines which at least attempt to hide their violent purposes and goals, floating nuclear reactors openly invite becoming military targets of opposing nuclear powers which are not naïve enough to think that such do not pose a serious threat to the military balance in the region.

Second, if successful the deployment of nuclear reactors in the South China Sea solidifies China’s Ten Dash Line claim extending Chinese territory as if the South China Sea is part of that land territory. It must be obvious by now that all of China’s actions in the disputed maritime zone have been focused more on actual occupation first and legalities only a mere second.

Unless called out by violated sovereigns and countries safeguarding freedom of navigation through international waters, China has behaved as the sovereign over much of the South China Sea. China’s economic and military might have enabled it to behave in a way that ignores the international rule of law. China, like Russia, justifies its actions by claiming that rival United States has been doing the same. 

Russia and China rationalize that while the dominant US has dictated the world order, they also accuse the Americans of secretly violating the same order in undermining regimes, promoting American business monopolies, and limiting their rivals.

Accusing the US of practicing unfair unipolarity, Putin and Xi have been advancing their own alternatives to the American global order by coming up with equivalent international rules favorable to non-democracies. The associations they lead now challenge the United Nations and other US-led Western alliances like NATO. ‘Realpolitik’ is the chosen path of international relations for both China and Russia over Liberalist approaches. 

Despite the international rule of law enforced by the United Nations, a strong China has put up physical structures in the South China Sea making these artificial islands its military bases across maritime zones also claimed by the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia. By these actions, China makes the South China Sea the global (not just regional) flashpoint from which a possible World War III can ignite. 

‘The South China Sea provides 12% of the world’s fish catch and transit to around one-third of global sea trade’ (necessitating freedom of navigation). China’s intended deployment of nuclear power on board floating vessels and the artificial bases and BRI ports only brings the world closer to nuclear annihilation. 

While China does this, its grand strategy is to overwhelm the world in every possible way – not just militarily but socio-economically as well. China has been sending its people (many suspected to be PLA) to many countries all around the world. After all, China has the world’s biggest population. 

So, we find suspected PLA agents in countries like the Philippines, Germany, Africa, and even the US. China has arguably the world’s largest economy so it has trillions of Chinese Yuan to manufacture nuclear warheads to catch up to the US and Russia. The People’s Liberation Army is already arguably the world’s largest army and follows just behind the US and Russia in nuclear stockpile.

Finally, the ‘might is right’ strategy of China is likely to bring about a hardline response from opposing world nuclear powers that could catapult the world onto another global war. While nuclear warheads are acknowledged to bring about mutually assured destruction, their continued possession has been utilized by world leaders to serve their countries’ national interests. 

The mortal danger posed by nuclear weapons has long been realized as early as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Fast forward to 2024 and we see a world where nuclear weapons proliferation is once again on the upswing. This time, a powerful China is weighing in on the arms race and is currently poised to catch up to the US and Russia. 

There was an attempt during the Cold War to limit and delimit nuclear arms proliferation and for a time it succeeded but now we know that this has failed. Perhaps, the generations of today do not possess the awareness of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and are thus unable to properly process what nuclear annihilation might be. 

Today’s technology makes almost everything look so easy. Wars and catastrophes might even seem like video games to the young whose only exposure to war is the computer screen. There are only nine nuclear power countries today. 

Three of these are assessed to hold on to their arsenal as a means to assert their global power. But none of the three is more assertive today than China. Unlike Russia and the US, China is the new kid on the superpower block and is out to prove its worth. 

The world would like to believe that the possession of nuclear weapons is useful only as a weapon of psychological warfare. China appears to be a master of this type of warfare. After all, it has waited ever so patiently through the strategic defensive and strategic stalemate stages of its grand strategy for decades. 

Now that it is in its strategic offensive phase, China seems all-out in its drive. It has raised a strong army, weaponized social media, exported manpower to countries of its interest, joined the nuclear arms race, and is now poised to deploy floating nuclear reactors across the South China Sea. Authoritarian nations assess democracies like the United States as weak and fight only when cornered. 

They assess the ‘just war theory’ practiced by the democratic peace nations as too late a response to win wars. However, while the hesitancy to provoke wars may be true for democracies the assessment that they are weak because of it seems misguided. In World War II, the US only entered the war when it was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Nevertheless, the US went on to win the war against Germany, Japan, and Italy. Then, the USSR became allied with the US after Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union in 1941. 

While Authoritarianism has its advantages, it also has serious flaws. As a political tool, centralism can administer governance quite efficiently ridding it of endless debates and wasted time to implement public projects. 

However, it also lacks the essential check and balance that legitimizes public policy-making and execution towards arriving at policy choices that derive optimal outcomes resolving public problems. Nevertheless, the great advantage wielded by China is that it is a command polity and economy. 

Unlike democratic nations with private sectors, China essentially operates like a ‘China, Incorporated’. It not only has the world’s largest economy but it can also concentrate its economic might towards weaponizing its entire structure towards world conquest. Germany, Japan, and the former Soviet Union came close to this type of structure but even they do not compare to the overall power that China now wields. 

In a ‘just war’ sense, therefore, it is most likely that authoritarian China will push the first button when it comes to igniting a war it thinks it can win. 

Encouraged by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s planned deployment of floating nuclear reactors across the South China Sea addresses its imperialistic goals across all fronts. China is not deploying because it is wary of the possible adverse outcome of its adventurism itself. It is deploying because it believes the present time to be its hour and destiny according to the gods of its own making.