China’s recent submarine-launched ballistic missile test into the Pacific should be understood as more than strategic signalling: it marks a shift in the maritime and nuclear geometry of the Indo-Pacific.
Drawing a parallel with the Soviet Navy’s OKEAN 75 exercise, this article argues that Australia and its allies must move beyond declaratory concern and invest in the surveillance, contestability, resilience, and force structure needed to sustain deterrence and the maritime order.
China’s recent test of a nuclear-capable missile from a ballistic missile submarine into the Pacific is not simply another exercise in strategic signalling. It marks a structural shift in how Beijing can threaten the maritime order and the alliances that underpin it. The launch demonstrated that China is edging toward a survivable, sea-based nuclear deterrent that can be employed from bastions close to home yet reach deep into the Pacific. This alters the strategic geometry for the United States and its allies in ways that cannot be wished away with familiar language about stability and restraint.
There is a temptation to treat such tests as just another data point in China’s long military modernisation. That misses the point. For a continental power structurally vulnerable to maritime blockade, acquiring a credible sea‑based nuclear arm changes incentives in any future crisis. In this sense, the test is less a message than a marker — the moment China’s nuclear posture begins to resemble the Soviet transition from coastal defence to global reach in the 1970s, with all the attendant risks.
During exercise OKEAN‑75, the Soviet Navy demonstrated it could coordinate hundreds of ships, submarines, and long-range aircraft in simulated strikes across multiple oceans. It proved the Soviets could integrate globally dispersed fleets into near‑simultaneous attacks through complex command‑and‑control networks, including satellite relays. The United States and NATO recognised it was facing a global threat to vital supply lines and maritime access from an integrated mix of air, surface, and subsurface assets. OKEAN‑75 did not threaten war directly; it forced the West to recognise that the sea was no longer an uncontested medium. China’s emerging sea‑based nuclear reach plays a similar role today: it signals that the maritime domain can no longer be treated as a sanctuary for allied escalation control.
The more interesting question today is not what China intended to signal with its SLBM launch, but what the test reveals about us. For a generation, most U.S. allies behaved as if the post-Cold War order were self-maintaining, as though globalisation, and its institutions, carefully crafted cables and narrative could substitute for usable military capability. Washington’s irritation with allied free‑riding is not new, but it has deepened as European and Indo‑Pacific partners prove slow to translate alarmed rhetoric about Russia and China into timely, concrete force structure decisions.
Australia is no exception. We are quick to issue statements of concern, yet slower to accept what those statements imply. A country that depends almost entirely on seaborne trade and undersea cables still struggles to move from conceptual endorsement of maritime security to the mundane disciplines of timely shipbuilding, sustainable maintenance, and credible munitions stockpiles. We welcome U.S. and British commitment through AUKUS, but our own tempo of delivery and readiness rarely matches the urgency of our communiqués. From Washington’s perspective, there is a widening gap between Australia’s declaratory posture as a frontline Indo‑Pacific ally and the alacrity with which we carry our share of the load.
Western elites assumed that the post-Cold War world was wired to automatically translate global commerce into unassailable liberalism. The prioritisation of normative agendas over force‑structure realities enabled rising powers the space to master the mechanics of the world’s institutions. The deeper malaise is conceptual. Too many allied leaders persist in the quiet conviction that liberalism will prevail: that markets, institutions, and interdependence will eventually tame aggressive continental powers without requiring sustained, politically expensive investment in deterrence.
This is to forget that the contemporary “rules‑based order” is at its heart, a maritime order built and sustained by trading states that turned geography and sea power into institutions. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea retain continental outlooks that view spheres of influence, not shared commons, as the natural contours of international life. Western misplaced confidence that norms and interdependence alone will discipline these regimes collided with reality. China is prepared to fire nuclear‑capable missiles from submarines into the Pacific, and to engage in hazardous undersea behaviour with allied navies, is not a state that intends to be socialised gently into the status quo. If allies do not adjust, Beijing will see alliances and coalitions good at words and poor at deeds.
One of the most persistent errors in our public conversation is the belief that foreign policy can be discussed independently of force structure. It cannot. Foreign policy transcends military capability, but that military capability sets the menu of plausible options. At sea, that menu is narrowing. Submarine‑launched missiles with increasing range and accuracy, backed by improving ISR networks, are eroding the comfortable distance that once insulated Australia and other U.S. allies from rapid escalation. For a maritime state, credible national security now rests on three deliverables.
First, the ability to know what is in our approaches and along our sea lines of communication: persistent undersea, surface and air surveillance, not episodic “presence.” Second, the capacity to contest that space – through submarines, surface combatants, aircraft and increasingly autonomous systems – at a tempo and scale any adversary must take seriously in its planning. And lastly, the resilience to absorb shocks: diversified infrastructure, hardened and redundant communications, and an industrial base capable of sustaining operations beyond the length of a news cycle.
None of these can be conjured after the next SLBM test or on-water incident. They require sustained investment, political discipline, and a willingness to accept that the Indo‑Pacific’s nuclear and maritime geometry has already changed. The OKEAN moment is upon us. For Australia, alliances, institutions and maintaining a credible deterrent force frame the trinity that sustains the rules‑based order. The question for Australia and its allies is whether we will treat this launch as a warning or another passing headline.
Dr Sean Andrews, CSC, is a retired Royal Australian Navy officer and maritime strategist, currently Senior Fellow at the Strategy, Statecraft and Technology – Changing Character of War Centre, Pembroke College, Oxford University. He has led Australia’s Sea Power Centre, commanded ADF operations in the Middle East, and publishes widely on Indo-Pacific sea power, maritime security, and the global oceanic order.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
