What's up with the black soot from the first toss ?
China Ballistic Missiles and Nuclear Arms Thread
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What's up with the black soot from the first toss ?
DF-26 is cold launched. The black gas is produced by a gas generator which is not part of the missile itself, propelling it out of the launch tube before the missile ignites.
Well it is true that China does not have enough plutonium (less than 2 tons) and tritium/deuterium gas to produce a lot of thermonuclear warheads, but it does have some 16-18 tons of HEU to produce lots of fission devices.
I wonder if the CCP really has more than the few hundred to a thousand warheads it's estimated to have. Doesn't China have enough fissile material for a Russia/US level stockpile? If not, couldn't it mine within China or buy from Russia? Surely there's enough deposits in China.
It doesn't make sense for China to only have 300 warheads if the ICBM + SLBM count far exceeds this when you include MIRVed rockets. It needs to let others know for there to be good deterrent value and it seems like it's still holding on to the very dated hope that maintaining a non threatening posture and refraining from going to war will prove to the West that China is not a rogue military threat and a responsible nation.
If it's a case of China secretly letting the US know to gain deterrence, why wouldn't the US disclose this and use it as yet another "China's bad mmkay?" I think the CCP may have blundered and miscalculated here like it miscalculated US resolve in bringing China down with every means including hurting itself in the process. It's not too late to mass produce like it wasn't too late for Chinese IC industry to turn things around.
The retired PLA general to which this claim has been attributed to has come out in Chinese social media to say that his original statements do not contain anything like it (that China has the capability of launch on warning). He said various media quotes add this themselves.
bajingan
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At the end of the day nuclear weapons is 50 years old technology, its not cutting edge technology like IC or AI. i find it hard to believe that China is not capable of of mass producing nuclear warheads just because she lacked fissile materials to do so
China's outrageously small nuke arsenal is a historic legacy. China had the capacity to build a reasonable sized arsenal in the 1970's. but Deng saw the nuclear arm race between the US and the Soviet as senseless and madness. he first shut down and dismantled a massive facility in Sichuan which was just completed, later he shut down facilities in Lanzhou and Qinghai, which literally terminated China's nuclear program. the end of the cold war seems vindicated Deng's view, Jiang and Hu never revisited the issue.
That's right. China has ceased the production of plutonium since the late 1980s.
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