China has conducted a test of its JL-3 submarine-launched ballistic missile into the open ocean — a departure from its usual practice of lobbing missiles into the desert or splashing them down in domestic waters. Jeffrey and Aaron Stein sit down to talk about why China would test this way: what an open-ocean flight test actually demonstrates, how it mirrors the way the United States, Russia, France, and other nuclear powers have long tested their sea-based deterrents, and what it tells us that China is increasingly behaving like a normal nuclear weapons state. They also dig into what the test suggests about China's internal politics — who benefits from testing in a more conventional way, and what it means when the world's most opaque nuclear program starts doing things everyone can see.

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