If they are under mountains how would anyone know if they're there?
China Ballistic Missiles and Nuclear Arms Thread
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Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
The site show in FAS is testing ground and not the real thing
How do you know they don't have any silos in Mountains?
Edit @Temstar asked what needed to be asked. Delete this post. Heh
It might take decades (and prohibitively expensive) to dig hardened tunnels in mountainous Western Sichuan. That's one of the reasons why the Sichuan-Tibet railway construction has been slowed to a craw. So if you start right now, a new ICBM base may not be fully operational until 2040s or later. Well, the Fuling 816 Plutonium Reprocessing Plant was under construction from 1966 to 1986 before being completely abandoned. That project made sense theoretically, but the engineering and cost were simply prohibitively high, especially when political priorities shifted in the 1980s.
Yuan's (who makes a lot of video on both Chinese scientific advancement as well as strategic deterrence") latest video on PLARF and particularly the sale of DF-3 to Saudi Arabia decades ago and the more recent sale of DF-21.
Interesting question he posses at the start of the video: if it takes 30 minutes for ICBM to land after launch, and it takes 1 hour to fuel up DF-5, and DF-5 are based in giant silos which are dead obvious from space and sure to be hit among the first targets in a nuclear exchange than how can one be so sure in that DF-5 will safely be launched prior to their silos being hit?
Only possible answer: to launch first
I've always thought R-36 was a beast of a missile and with a similar silo-based, liquid fuel set up is only intended for first strike. Looking up the size DF-5 is actually pretty comparable to R-36. Consider that when you consider the "no first use" policy of China.
DF-5 is the tallest guy in that line up, R-36 are the two on the far left.
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I read somewhere [or even on this website] that China had meticulously continued building, or has built the China 'Underground Great Wall' which is under various mountain ranges to accommodate retaliatory missiles, including nuclear armed missiles. China has also pledged not the first to attack, but will retaliate and give the enemy a bloody heavy wound that they will never forget.
China can do this ONLY WHEN its SBIR satellites are operational. You don't want to have too many false alarms or mis-identifications.
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