Didn't say that. I brought up French reactors because in order for China to be able to buy them, they would have to follow the rules and allow outside independent inspectors. What do they do exactly? I don't know but they can get an idea what China might have from that. And I did say at minimum not how many China has in total. Am I an expert? No. I just remember reading an article over a decade ago talking about how they figure some of this stuff out. The Iran deal that Trump canceled was suppose to allow inspectors in and when it was suspected they had an underground facility, they were supposed to be allowed in there if demanded.
Right and my point is that China is well and truly above that and above that by quite far. It doesn't have the same issue of needing to show undisclosed facilities. Even Iran doesn't really need to. It doesn't show facilities it "does not have"
With China, it's been able to refine material since the 1960s. This isn't new to China. It's probably got many facilities refining material. None of these facilities need to be reported or shown. There is no treaty or rule saying China must show others what nuclear processing facilities it has. It's the exact opposite of how this works. Secret nuclear facilities are just that, secret.
France does not inspect all of China's nuclear facilities. It just looks over the French reactor and the materials going and leaving it.
China has two of its own reactor designs, French ones, Russian ones, and an American one. It should also have plenty of facilities that are off the books, dedicated to refining weapons material. This is a given since this is how nuclear weapons are made.
Therefore no country is able to put together a good enough picture of how many kilograms of refined U or Pu China has and how many kilograms of raw ore it has in the ground. This means it is no more possible to figure out how many warheads China already has and can have than it would be for China to determine how many warheads the US can have. The possible range makes such a calculation near worthless.
China's reported count of around 300 warheads is based on what China said in the 1980s, extremely dated and unreliable information. It may serve as a minimum bound guess but the upper limit is impossible to determine with accuracy because China has its own nuclear reactors, has its own uranium ore reserves, has facilities refining material beyond the knowledge of outsiders, and no independent investigator has any right to check all of China's nuclear facilities and stockpiles any more than they have the right to demand China show them where secret facilities are.
