A Nuclear-Powered Aircraft Carrier for China? For years, Western analysts have nervously tracked the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) as it steadily built up the second-largest aircraft carrier fleet in the world.
The conventional wisdom has long held that China’s naval buildup is inevitable, unstoppable, and destined to match or even eclipse the United States Navy.
But when it comes to China’s dreams of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the reality is a little messier – and much less certain.
China’s Great Nuclear-Powered Aircraft Carrier Mystery
The idea of a Chinese nuclear carrier isn’t new. Hints and leaks about a nuclear-powered supercarrier, sometimes labeled “Type 004,” have floated around Chinese media for nearly a decade. Beijing’s ambition is clear: nuclear propulsion would allow China’s future carriers to stay at sea longer, project power farther, and match the technological sophistication of U.S. Nimitz- and Ford-class carriers.
In a world where China is openly challenging the American-led maritime order, nuclear-powered carriers would be a potent symbol that China has truly arrived as a global naval power.
But as of April 2025, no such ship exists. And there are good reasons to doubt that China will realize this dream anytime soon.
Quality vs. Quantity Debate for China’s Navy
First, building a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is vastly more complicated than building a conventional one. It’s not simply a matter of swapping out diesel engines for reactors. Nuclear propulsion affects the carrier’s weight, balance, internal layout, maintenance needs, training demands, and resupply logistics. The leap from a conventional carrier to a nuclear one is greater than the leap from no carrier to a conventional carrier.
The United States learned this lesson the hard way during the Cold War. Even for America—with its deep bench of nuclear engineering talent, decades of experience with naval reactors, and an industrial base firing on all cylinders – building and maintaining nuclear carriers has been a monumental effort. The first nuclear-powered carrier, the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), entered service in 1961. Since then, America has maintained an unbroken line of nuclear carrier production – but at staggering financial and logistical cost.
China, for all its shipbuilding prowess, has never built a nuclear-powered surface ship. It operates nuclear-powered submarines, but they remain a generation or more behind U.S. and even Russian designs in noise reduction, reactor safety, and operational reliability. If Beijing cannot yet field a world-class nuclear attack submarine, it is a fantasy to think it can leapfrog directly into building a nuclear-powered carrier on par with the Gerald R. Ford class.
Second, China’s industrial base faces serious obstacles that are often papered over by Western analysts. While China can mass-produce container ships, frigates, and even conventional carriers at impressive speed, it struggles with the truly high-end systems integration required for nuclear naval propulsion. As of 2025, there is no hard evidence that China’s naval shipyards have mastered miniaturized naval reactors suitable for a surface ship of carrier size. Nor is there evidence that China’s navy has solved the staggering logistical and maintenance challenges that come with operating nuclear-powered surface combatants far from home.
In other words, China’s shipyards are good at quantity. But quantity does not automatically translate into the quality or sophistication needed to sustain nuclear-powered carrier operations.
Third, we must reckon with the strategic question: does China even need nuclear carriers to achieve its core military objectives?
China’s grand strategy, at least for now, is primarily focused on the Indo-Pacific. Beijing’s primary targets are Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea—not the open oceans of the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean. For these regional theaters, conventionally powered carriers are more than adequate. The Fujian (Type 003) carrier, for example, with its electromagnetic catapult system and large air wing, will be able to project power effectively across all of China’s immediate periphery once it becomes fully operational.
In fact, for regional dominance, nuclear propulsion offers limited marginal returns. Nuclear carriers make sense for a navy planning to sustain power projection across vast distances for months on end, like the United States does in its role as a global hegemon. But if Beijing is content – for now – to build a regional sphere of influence rather than a truly global blue-water empire, then the urgency for nuclear carriers diminishes.
The Money Part Is Not Easy
Moreover, nuclear carriers are breathtakingly expensive. Even for the United States, the costs of building and operating a Ford-class carrier and its accompanying air wing and escorts are astronomical. For China, which is facing a slowing economy, mounting demographic decline, and a raft of internal pressures from financial instability to political discontent, sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into a fleet of nuclear supercarriers might not be the wisest choice.
Indeed, if Beijing is smart – and often it is – it will continue to invest in capabilities that complicate American power projection (like anti-ship ballistic missiles, submarines, and cyberwarfare tools) rather than trying to mimic America ship-for-ship.
Nuclear-powered supercarriers might have great prestige value, but prestige is not the same as strategic utility.
Finally, there is a serious technological question about whether the future even belongs to giant carriers at all. Hypersonic missiles, drone swarms, and advanced undersea weapons threaten to make large surface ships increasingly vulnerable. It is no longer clear that spending a fortune on behemoth carriers, whether nuclear-powered or conventionally fueled, is a sound investment in a world of cheap, deadly precision strike weapons. If China is thinking ahead, it might decide that the 20th-century model of seaborne power projection is not the way to win in the 21st century.
What Happens Now?
So what are the real options for China?
One option is to continue refining and expanding its conventional carrier fleet. The PLAN could field three to six conventional supercarriers over the next decade, enough to dominate its regional waters without assuming the burdens of nuclear propulsion.
A second option is to attempt a slow, cautious move into nuclear propulsion by building a single, experimental nuclear-powered carrier sometime in the 2030s – learning by doing, much as the United States did with Enterprise in the 1960s. This would carry enormous technical and financial risks, but if successful, could set the stage for a true global blue-water navy by mid-century.
A third option – perhaps the smartest one – is to focus not on building more vulnerable floating cities, but on perfecting the weapons that can sink them. China has already invested heavily in anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) systems. Doubling down on missiles, drones, submarines, and cyber capabilities could allow China to neutralize American carriers without matching them.
And there is, finally, a fourth option: a hybrid strategy. Build a few more conventional carriers for prestige and regional control, while pouring most resources into the next-generation tools of asymmetric maritime warfare.
In the end, China’s nuclear-powered aircraft carrier dreams are real – but they are still dreams. They are unlikely to materialize soon. And even if they do, they may turn out to be gilded relics of a past era, rather than instruments of a victorious future.
For the United States, the proper response is not panic, overreaction, or another round of hyper-militarized spending aimed at chasing China carrier-for-carrier. It is strategic patience. It is maritime restraint. It is resisting the temptation to mirror every Chinese ambition with a dollar-for-dollar counter.
China’s nuclear carrier program is a costly, risky, prestige-driven project that may yield more symbolism than real combat power. America would do better to conserve its strength, focus on affordable, resilient, distributed maritime capabilities, and remember that the true test of sea power in the 21st century will not be who fields the biggest ships – but who can deny the sea to others most effectively, at the least cost to themselves.
Restraint, not rivalry for rivalry’s sake, is the key to prevailing in this new era.
About the Author: Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. Andrew is now a Contributing Editor to 19FortyFive.
