China Ballistic Missiles and Nuclear Arms Thread

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bladerunner

Banned Idiot
Re: Does China need more Nuclear Weapons ?

In the article, one of the things the author is saying is that because China's nuclear missiles are not nearly as accurate as the US or even the Sovients back then, therefore, China should be worried.

My question is whether the inaccuracy is true? And also, isn't nuclear missiles, as part of the deterence, aimed at cities as well, and not just silos? So even if the Chinese missiles are not very accurate, the deterence effect is still there?

If you was to accept the premise that the Chinese missiles of the 70's and 80's was a generation or two behind what the Soviets and the USSR had, then yes they were probably less accurate.
I Dont think the Chinese had any ICBM that could reach past the Western seaboard of the USA in the late 70's
 
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Thesisus

New Member
Re: Does China need more Nuclear Weapons ?

If you was to accept the premise that the Chinese missiles of the 70's and 80's was a generation or two behind what the Soviets and the USSR had, then yes they were probably less accurate.
I Dont think the Chinese had any ICBM that could reach past the Western seaboard of the USA in the late 70's

Not sure I am following you. Where did you get the referece for the China's 70's tecnology? I would've thought the article refers to the present day.

Here's a response piece from a person at the Centre for Strategic & International Studies to the Wall Street Journal article:

By Eli Jacobs

Nuclear security analysts are becoming increasingly worried about China’s development of a 3000-mile underground “Great Wall” to shelter their nuclear weapons. The tunnel network introduces serious doubts about the United States’ ability to carry out a disarming nuclear first strike against China, by introducing uncertainty about the number of Chinese weapons, their location within the underground fortress, and the capability of U.S. weapons to penetrate into the bunker.

Despite complicating the effectiveness of a U.S. first strike, the Chinese construction of a tunnel system validates the strategy of seeking nuclear primacy over China. By forcing the Chinese pursuit of numerous defensive measures to ensure second-strike capability, the United States reduces the amount of money China can spend to improve their nuclear weapons. The resulting relative lack of appealing first-strike options may make China think twice before escalating from conventional to nuclear war and, more significantly, may dissuade China from creating conditions that could produce conventional conflict in the first place.

The orientation of Chinese nuclear policy is largely defensive. The tunnel network is the capstone of a long-term project to create a mobile, sheltered nuclear arsenal that is less vulnerable to first strike. This project has seen them construct a nuclear submarine capability and a variety of short- and intermediate-range mobile missiles that could be used to attack U.S. allies or forward-deployed military forces such as aircraft carriers. Importantly, although China is developing long-range road mobiles, these weapons are numerically de-emphasized, with a primary emphasis on short-range ballistic missiles. This suggests that China is focusing on defending their homeland and interests in their near-abroad rather than attempting to achieve parity with U.S. nuclear forces.

A recent Wall Street Journal op ed opines that China’s massive network of tunnels indicates a secret, hostile motive:
One kilometer of tunneling is approximately equal to the cost of four or five nuclear weapons and certainly several delivery systems," [Karber] notes. Why would China devote such vast resources to building a protective network of tunnels, while devoting comparatively few to the weapons the tunnels are meant to protect?
To me, the more plausible reading of this statement is to conclude that China has likely spent so much money on tunneling that it has not been able to spend significantly on the development of offensive nuclear capabilities – such as low yield warheads or long-range ballistic missiles. Their current strategy is centered on self-defense in the event of a war over East Asia. If China did not fear losing this war, they would have greater capabilities to prepare to fight different ones – including, perhaps, strategic nuclear wars against the continental United States.

China’s declaratory policy of “No First Use” matches this assessment of their current defensive orientation. Although there are a number of circumstances when China would consider abandoning its declaratory policy – when it’s facing defeat in a conventional war, for example – the existence of the pledge goes quite a ways in shaping Chinese strategic discussions. Intellectuals do not typically ponder nuclear first-strike contingencies. As a result, should a circumstance arise that may make China contemplate abandoning NFU, they may not possess the strategic consensus required to be confident in the efficacy of various first-strike options. This reality may make China hesitate to escalate to nuclear conflict and, more significantly, it may make Beijing think twice before initiating a conflict that might result in circumstances where it would need to rethink its NFU promise.

China’s nuclear capabilities follow from the retaliatory, second-strike approach of its defense posture. Estimates place China’s nuclear stockpile at 250-400 weapons, a fraction of the 1550 strategic weapons the United States deploys under New START. An arsenal this size could do significant damage to the United States and our allies, but it is not large enough to achieve strategic victory in a nuclear war with the U.S.

Some might attribute this defensive emphasis to Chinese strategic culture. Indeed, the relative consistency of their nuclear doctrine since testing in 1964 suggests that cultural factors may play a role in sculpting their nuclear decision-making. However, debates among Chinese strategists about whether to maintain minimum deterrence or adopt a slightly more robust limited deterrent indicate the opposite: Chinese defense policy has a certain degree of fluidity. In that vein, it would be extremely short-sighted for the United States to follow a singular narrative of Chinese nuclear strategy in adopting policies that incentivize a shift away from China’s primarily defensive nuclear planning.

China’s stated intention for building its massive underground tunnel is to ensure second-strike capability against the United States. Given the importance of this underground network to China’s nuclear weapons complex (they’ve been working on it since 1995), it’s fair to assume that similar motives guide China’s overall nuclear policy.

However, it is unwise to expect the centrality of these motives to persist into perpetuity. A changing international environment may prompt China to reevaluate their defense goals. Pro-engagement commentators make this argument. For instance, Carnegie’s Michael Swaine argues:
China’s strategic mindset is quintessentially defensive, largely reactive, and focused first and foremost on deterring Taiwan’s independence and defending the Chinese mainland, not on establishing itself as Asia’s next hegemon. Although it is not inconceivable that China might adopt more ambitious, far-flung military objectives in the future—perhaps including an attempt to become the preeminent Asian military power—such goals remain ill-defined, undetermined and subject to much debate in Beijing. This suggests that China’s future strategic orientation is susceptible to outside influence, not fixed in stone.
As a result of this malleability, Swaine suggests that the United States should “shape a ‘mixed’ regional approach focused more on creating incentives to cooperate than on neutralizing every possible Chinese military capability of concern to U.S. defense analysts.”

I would like to suggest a different interpretation of this malleability. Given their growing economy, China will have increasing means to acquire greater economic and military leverage over international events. It serves their national interest to take advantage of these opportunities. At many junctures, the United States national interest will compete with China’s – over economic issues such as Asian market access and over military issues such as forward deployment of naval power and the status of Taiwan.

Although cooperation must play an important role in the United States’ relationship with China, it is unrealistic to expect countries that are so economically powerful yet politically divergent to agree over all critical international issues. High-stakes disagreements are inevitable. Most of these will be resolved without violence, if not amicably, based on an assessment by either side of the potential risks and rewards of taking an openly combative stance.

One way that China can limit U.S. freedom of action in these disputes is to develop greater offensive nuclear capabilities – such as more and low yield warheads and more long-range ballistic missiles – and work towards nuclear parity with the United States. Even though the U.S. nuclear arsenal would likely still outstrip China’s, the possibility of a costly and uncertain escalation (as opposed to a situation in which the United States possessed escalation dominance) may prevent the United States from intervening in issues that are of greater importance to China than to the United States, such as Chinese attempts to stabilize the DPRK regime or develop amphibious weaponry for a potential attack of Taiwan.

Given their greater resources, superior nuclear forces will serve China’s national interests regardless of U.S defense policy. Fortunately, U.S. nuclear primacy helps to change the valence of that build-up, orienting it towards a defensive stance by making it too expensive to develop useful but non-essential offensive nuclear capabilities.

The grave threat of U.S. nuclear first strike is, thus, a contributor to China’s current defensive nuclear posture. Ceasing the pursuit of primacy would serve as a de facto acknowledgement of mutual vulnerability; it would free up resources for China to make progress on other, more offensive components of its arsenal. These measures, pursued in the absence of a U.S. nuclear first strike option, would give China the means to prepare for nuclear first-use contingencies. This would not only make them more confident about last-ditch escalation to nuclear war in a failing conventional conflict, but also give them less pause about initiating conflicts, given their expectation of greater freedom of action.

In short, forcing China to plan to defend itself against U.S. first strike orients their strategic culture around defensive as opposed to offensive posturing and reduces their means to invest in offensive nuclear capabilities. Thus, while China’s tunnel network reduces the likelihood that the United States possesses nuclear primacy, it is a form of strategic tunnel vision to argue that we should, as a result, accept a reality of mutual vulnerability. Continuing to introduce meaningful doubt into China’s understanding of the security of their deterrent forces them to spend to protect it, rather than spending to threaten or compete with the United States.

So, given China’s 3000 mile tunnel system, can we continue to introduce this meaningful doubt into China’s defense calculus? I think so. Current anti-tunnel technology, used most prominently by the Israelis to prevent smuggling of arms into Gaza, is used locally and is surprisingly ineffective. The United States faces an even greater challenge than Israel: it cannot continuously bombard China’s tunnel network in the way that Israel continuously bombards smuggling tunnels into Gaza, because that could jeopardize crucial areas of cooperation with Beijing and may even be understood as a precursor to preventative nuclear first-strike.

However, technological development in anti-tunnel technology has been constant. A new two-component explosive that can be planted remotely seems promising, and further developments could be achieved through concerted research. Further, a good deal of information exists about China’s underground missile base, to which the tunnel network is a mere corollary. Holding this base at risk with earth penetrating nuclear weapons such as the B61-11 would call into question China’s second-strike capability. Further, entrances and exits to the tunnel system could be identified through satellite surveillance. Triangulation between various tunnel entrances and known missile base information could guide barrage nuclear strikes that close off the tunnels, even while not fully destroying them.

In brief, despite China’s tunnel system, we should not abandon the pursuit of nuclear primacy over China. While the scope of their tunnel system suggests that China could pose an increasing nuclear threat, it also suggests, more importantly, that our current strategy is working in compelling them to develop defensive as opposed to offensive nuclear capabilities.

Eli Jacobs is a research intern for the Project on Nuclear Issues. The views expressed above are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Strategic and International Studies or the Project on Nuclear Issues.

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delft

Brigadier
Re: Does China need more Nuclear Weapons ?

To #41
I would say that the Pakalert Press story is too strange to believe, but I remember an interview with John le Carre in which he said something like truth ( about spying ) is too strange for me to use in my books.
 

delft

Brigadier
Re: Does China need more Nuclear Weapons ?

To #47
The Eli Jacobs article is truly strange. If China were to double its military spend it would still be a smaller part of the Chinese economy than the Pentagon spend is of the US's and then there would be money enough to build the excessive nuclear armaments he says the US's aggressive posture prevents.
 

Oversea Chinese

Just Hatched
Registered Member
Re: Does China need more Nuclear Weapons ?

Definitely Yes.
China need at least 5,000 nuclear warheads for deterrent to be effective
 

Oversea Chinese

Just Hatched
Registered Member
Re: Does China need more Nuclear Weapons ?

China have 5,000km of underground tunnels.
Over 2,000 nuclear missiles stored & hidden inside.
 

AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
Re: Does China need more Nuclear Weapons ?

I love how people pick and choose what information they want to believe. I thought China is always deceptive yet apparently watching Chinese television melodramas about the Chinese military exposes the truth? I bet some of these students are reading this forum and this very thread to get there information. So many contradictions to the general propaganda.


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Georgetown students shed light on China’s tunnel system for nuclear weapons
By William Wan, Published: November 29
The Chinese have called it their “Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.

For the past three years, a small band of obsessively dedicated students at Georgetown University has called it something else: homework.

Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.

The result of their effort? The largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the Chinese military in charge of protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.

The study is yet to be released, but already it has sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top officials in the Pentagon, including the Air Force vice chief of staff.

Most of the attention has focused on the 363-page study’s provocative conclusion — that China’s nuclear arsenal could be many times larger than the well-established estimates of arms-control experts.

“It’s not quite a bombshell, but those thoughts and estimates are being checked against what people think they know based on classified information,” said a Defense Department strategist who would discuss the study only on the condition of anonymity.

The study’s critics, however, have questioned the unorthodox Internet-based research of the students, who drew from sources as disparate as Google Earth, blogs, military journals and, perhaps most startlingly, a fictionalized TV docudrama about Chinese artillery soldiers — the rough equivalent of watching Fox’s TV show “24” for insights into U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

But the strongest condemnation has come from nonproliferation experts who worry that the study could fuel arguments for maintaining nuclear weapons in an era when efforts are being made to reduce the world’s post-Cold War stockpiles.

Beyond its impact in the policy world, the project has made a profound mark on the students — including some who have since graduated and taken research jobs with the Defense Department and Congress.

“I don’t even want to know how many hours I spent on it,” said Nick Yarosh, 22, an international politics senior at Georgetown. “But you ask people what they did in college, most just say I took this class, I was in this club. I can say I spent it reading Chinese nuclear strategy and Second Artillery manuals. For a nerd like me, that really means something.”

For students, an obsession

The students’ professor, Phillip A. Karber, 65, had spent the Cold War as a top strategist reporting directly to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But it was his early work in defense that cemented his reputation, when he led an elite research team created by Henry Kissinger, who was then the national security adviser, to probe the weaknesses of Soviet forces.

Karber prided himself on recruiting the best intelligence analysts in the government. “You didn’t just want the highest-ranking or brightest guys, you wanted the ones who were hungry,” he said.

In 2008, Karber was volunteering on a committee for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a Pentagon agency charged with countering weapons of mass destruction.

After a devastating earthquake struck Sichuan province, the chairman of Karber’s committee noticed Chinese news accounts reporting that thousands of radiation technicians were rushing to the region. Then came pictures of strangely collapsed hills and speculation that the caved-in tunnels in the area had held nuclear weapons.

Find out what’s going on, the chairman asked Karber, who began looking for analysts again — this time among his students at Georgetown.

The first inductees came from his arms-control classes. Each semester, he set aside a day to show them tantalizing videos and documents he had begun gathering on the tunnels. Then he concluded with a simple question: What do you think it means?

“The fact that there were no answers to that really got to me,” said former student Dustin Walker, 22. “It started out like any other class, tests on this day or that, but people kept coming back, even after graduation. . . . We spent hours on our own outside of class on this stuff.”

The students worked in their dorms translating military texts. They skipped movie nights for marathon sessions reviewing TV clips of missiles being moved from one tunnel structure to another. While their friends read Shakespeare, they gathered in the library to war-game worst-case scenarios of a Chinese nuclear strike on the United States.

Over time, the team grew from a handful of contributors to roughly two dozen. Most spent their time studying the subterranean activities of the Second Artillery Corps.

While the tunnels’ existence was something of an open secret among the handful of experts studying China’s nuclear arms, almost no papers or public reports on the structures existed.

So the students turned to publicly available Chinese sources — military journals, local news reports and online photos posted by Chinese citizens. It helped that China’s famously secretive military was beginning to release more information, driven by its leaders’ eagerness to show off China’s growing power to its citizens.

The Internet also generated a raft of leads: new military forums, blogs and once-obscure local TV reports now posted on the Chinese equivalents of YouTube. Strategic string searches even allowed the students to get behind some military Web sites and download documents such as syllabuses taught at China’s military academies.

Drudgery and discoveries

The main problem was the sheer amount of translation required.

Each semester, Karber managed to recruit only one or two Chinese-speaking students. So the team assembled a makeshift system to scan images of the books and documents they found. Using text-capture software, they converted those pictures into Chinese characters, which were fed into translation software to produce crude English versions. From those, they highlighted key passages for finer translation by the Chinese speakers.

The downside was the drudgery — hours feeding pages into the scanner. The upside was that after three years, the students had compiled a searchable database of more than 1.4 million words on the Second Artillery and its tunnels.

By combining everything they found in the journals, video clips, satellite imagery and photos, they were able to triangulate the location of several tunnel structures, with a rough idea of what types of missiles were stored in each.

Their work also yielded smaller revelations: how the missiles were kept mobile and transported from structure to structure, as well as tantalizing images and accounts of a “missile train” and disguised passenger rail cars to move China’s long-range missiles.

To facilitate the work, Karber set up research rooms for the students at his home in Great Falls. He bought Apple computers and large flat-screen monitors for their video work and obtained small research grants for those who wanted to work through the summer. When work ran late, many crashed in his basement’s spare room.

“I got fat working on this thing because I didn’t go to the gym anymore. It was that intense,” said Yarosh, who has continued on the project this year not for credit but purely as a hobby. “It’s not the typical college course. Dr. Karber just tells you the objective and gives you total freedom to figure out how to get there. That level of trust can be liberating.”

Some of the biggest breakthroughs came after members of Karber’s team used personal connections in China to obtain a 400-page manual produced by the Second Artillery and usually available only to China’s military personnel.

Another source of insight was a pair of semi-fictionalized TV series chronicling the lives of Second Artillery soldiers.

The plots were often overwrought with melodrama — one series centers on a brigade commander who struggles to whip his slipshod unit into shape while juggling relationship problems with his glamorous Olympic-swim-coach girlfriend. But they also included surprisingly accurate depictions of artillery units’ procedures that lined up perfectly with the military manual and other documents.

“Until someone showed us on screen how exactly these missile deployments were done from the tunnels, we only had disparate pieces. The TV shows gave us the big picture of how it all worked together,” Karber said.

A bigger Chinese arsenal?

In December 2009, just as the students began making progress, the Chinese military admitted for the first time that the Second Artillery had indeed been building a network of tunnels. According to a report by state-run CCTV, China had more than 3,000 miles of tunnels — roughly the distance between Boston and San Francisco — including deep underground bases that could withstand multiple nuclear attacks.

The news shocked Karber and his team. It confirmed the direction of their research, but it also highlighted how little attention the tunnels were garnering outside East Asia.

The lack of interest, particularly in the U.S. media, demonstrated China’s unique position in the world of nuclear arms.

For decades, the focus has been on the two powers with the largest nuclear stockpiles by far — the United States, with 5,000 warheads available for deployment, and Russia, which has 8,000.

But of the five nuclear weapons states recognized by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, China has been the most secretive. While the United States and Russia are bound by bilateral treaties that require on-site inspections, disclosure of forces and bans on certain missiles, China is not.

The assumption for years has been that the Chinese arsenal is relatively small — anywhere from 80 to 400 warheads.

China has encouraged that perception. As the only one of the five original nuclear states with a no-first-use policy, it insists that it keeps a small stockpile only for “minimum deterrence.”

Given China’s lack of transparency, Karber argues, all the experts have to work with are assumptions, which can often be dead wrong. As an example, Karber often recounts to his students his experience of going to Russia with former defense secretary Frank C. Carlucci to discuss U.S. help in securing the Russian nuclear arsenal.

The United States had offered Russia about 20,000 canisters designed to safeguard warheads — a number based on U.S. estimates at the time.

The generals told Karber they needed 40,000.

Skepticism among analysts

At the end of the tunnel study, Karber cautions that the same could happen with China. Based on the number of tunnels the Second Artillery is digging and its increasing deployment of missiles, he argues, China’s nuclear warheads could number as many as 3,000.

It is an assertion that has provoked heated responses from the arms-control community.

Gregory Kulacki, a China nuclear analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, publicly condemned Karber’s report at a recent lecture in Washington. In an interview afterward, he called the 3,000 figure “ridiculous” and said the study’s methodology — especially its inclusion of posts from Chinese bloggers — was “incompetent and lazy.”

“The fact that they’re building tunnels could actually reinforce the exact opposite point,” he argued. “With more tunnels and a better chance of survivability, they may think they don’t need as many warheads to strike back.”

Reaction from others has been more moderate.

“Their research has value, but it also shows the danger of the Internet,” said Hans M. Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists. Kristensen faulted some of the students’ interpretation of the satellite images.

“One thing his report accomplishes, I think, is it highlights the uncertainty about what China has,” said Mark Stokes, executive director of the Project 2049 Institute, a think tank. “There’s no question China’s been investing in tunnels, and to look at those efforts and pose this question is worthwhile.”

This year, the Defense Department’s annual report on China’s military highlighted for the first time the Second Artillery’s work on new tunnels, partly a result of Karber’s report, according to some Pentagon officials. And in the spring, shortly before a visit to China, some in the office of then-Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates were briefed on the study.

“I think it’s fair to say senior officials here have keyed upon the importance of this work,” said one Pentagon officer who was not authorized to speak on the record.

For Karber, provoking such debate means that he and his small army of undergrads have succeeded.

“I don’t have the slightest idea how many nuclear weapons China really has, but neither does anyone else in the arms-control community,” he said. “That’s the problem with China — no one really knows except them.”
 

Quickie

Colonel
Re: Does China need more Nuclear Weapons ?

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by Staff Writers
Washington (AFP) Nov 30, 2011



An unconventional project by US university students has concluded that China's nuclear arsenal could be many times larger than current estimates, drawing the attention of Pentagon analysts.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Georgetown University students under the instruction of a former Pentagon official have assembled the largest body of public knowledge yet about a vast network of secret tunnels dug by China's secretive Second Artillery Corps, responsible for nuclear warheads.

The 363-page study has not yet been published, but has already sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top US defense officials, including the Air Force vice chief of staff, the Post reported.

"Its not quite a bombshell, but those thoughts and estimates are being checked against what people think they know based on classified information," it quoted an unnamed Defense Department strategist as saying.

The newspaper said critics of the report had questioned the students methods, which included using Internet-based sources like Google Earth, blogs, military journals and even a fictionalized Chinese TV show.

But the Post also said the students were able to obtain a 400-page manual produced by the Second Artillery and usually only available to Chinese military personnel.

The students professor, Phillip Karber, 65, spent the Cold War as a top strategist reporting directly to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Post said.

Karber said that -- based on the study of the tunnels -- China could have up to 3,000 nuclear warheads, far higher than the current estimates, which range from 80 to 400, according to the Post.

US officials could not immediately be reached to comment on the report.
 

duskylim

Junior Member
VIP Professional
Re: Does China need more Nuclear Weapons ?

With regards to so-called authoritative statements as to the size and composition of the Chinese nuclear arsenal, the simple fact is that no-one in the West really know its true size or composition.

While it is a certainty that the West and especially the US is making all effort to ascertain this up to now uncertainty remains.

With tantalizing revelations by the Chinese themselves, like the vast tunnel system and the underground plutonium production reactors, the errors in estimating the Chinese arsenal are several orders of magnitude.

The reality is however that China has long had the capability and know-how to build a MAD arsenal.

The Chinese also appreciate that only the certainty of Mutual Assured Destruction will keep the West from attacking.
 
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