China Ballistic Missiles and Nuclear Arms Thread

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SEAD

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And China is not gonna end up with only 350 silos either. US alone has 450 Minuteman silos in active, I see no reason why China should not seek parity in silos with US.

New START Treaty expires on 2026 at which point China should have completed build-up and load-up of all 350 silos. It gives China a favorable position to negotiate a trilateral treaty with US and Russia in term of nuclear arm control.
If arms race begins, adding a bomb would be much cheaper than a silo, so that’s not a good idea to simply expand the scale of silos for survivability.

I mentioned 2024 mostly because of Trump, and for START negotiation, we know little about Chinese attitude and let’s see what will happen then.
 

clockwork

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Richard spouting off randomly again. He said the stockpile has "already doubled", is he implying the silos are online already? Was hoping he would give some updates on the mobile component but apparently he just talked about the SLBMs and ALBMs otherwise.
 

ChongqingHotPot92

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Richard spouting off randomly again. He said the stockpile has "already doubled", is he implying the silos are online already? Was hoping he would give some updates on the mobile component but apparently he just talked about the SLBMs and ALBMs otherwise.
I doubt that China's can produce this many nukes in just 1-2 years. It is one thing to complete the silos. It is another to have to the nuclear materials (Pu, HEU, tritium, deuterium, etc.) ready to assemble the bombs. However, 1,000+ bombs and 300+ ICBMs by 2030 is definitely an achievable goal.
 

Michaelsinodef

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I doubt that China's can produce this many nukes in just 1-2 years. It is one thing to complete the silos. It is another to have to the nuclear materials (Pu, HEU, tritium, deuterium, etc.) ready to assemble the bombs. However, 1,000+ bombs and 300+ ICBMs by 2030 is definitely an achievable goal.
China got lots of nuclear plants.

We have no idea in regards to the state of warheads they have.

If anything we should expect them to have started building warheads and Missiles when they started the silos (possible before even).

Not to mention the 300 estimate by rand is most likely also just wrong/not precise
 

FairAndUnbiased

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I doubt that China's can produce this many nukes in just 1-2 years. It is one thing to complete the silos. It is another to have to the nuclear materials (Pu, HEU, tritium, deuterium, etc.) ready to assemble the bombs. However, 1,000+ bombs and 300+ ICBMs by 2030 is definitely an achievable goal.
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, estimated by the typical lowballing FAS.

There's also been a
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and since 2015 China stopped declaring Pu stockpiles.
 

Kalec

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China has resumed plutonium production since at least 2017, it is pretty much a nothing burger with doubling in warhead counts.

What China needs to do urgently, is that filling up those silos with peacekeeper alike ICBMs in the next 2 or 3 years, better before 2024 election.

The true threshold is the number of launchers not warheads. Cannot wait to see how it plays out in 2022 nuclear posture review.
 

ZeEa5KPul

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I doubt that China's can produce this many nukes in just 1-2 years. It is one thing to complete the silos. It is another to have to the nuclear materials (Pu, HEU, tritium, deuterium, etc.) ready to assemble the bombs. However, 1,000+ bombs and 300+ ICBMs by 2030 is definitely an achievable goal.
You should express your doubts to the head of US strategic command. I'm sure that with your formidable expertise, he'll promptly reappraise his conclusions on what China can and can't produce.
 

Totoro

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I doubt that China's can produce this many nukes in just 1-2 years.
The US added 16 thousand nuke warheads from 1955 to 1960. And another 12.5 thousand from 1960 to 1965. Basically, the US was adding close to 3 thousand nuke warheads each year in that period, on average.

So if china already had some plutonium stockpile to begin with and if it indeed continued plutoniom production since 2017 or so- I'd say it's quite plausible that by today it reached a point where it can do at least what the US did from 1950 to 1955, when it added 2100 warheads. Meaning it might be able to add hundreds od warheads per year and might be working up the capacity to reach over a 1000 warheads per year soon.

Also worth remembering that by 1950s the US warheads were already in hundreds of kilotons, requiring a lot of plutonium. And by the 1960s yields were often several megatons if not more. Today's warheads are not as large. (Back then even some tactical nukes such as ones on air to air missiles were 250 KT in yield, basically what ICBM warheads are today)
 

clockwork

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The US added 16 thousand nuke warheads from 1955 to 1960. And another 12.5 thousand from 1960 to 1965. Basically, the US was adding close to 3 thousand nuke warheads each year in that period, on average.

So if china already had some plutonium stockpile to begin with and if it indeed continued plutoniom production since 2017 or so- I'd say it's quite plausible that by today it reached a point where it can do at least what the US did from 1950 to 1955, when it added 2100 warheads. Meaning it might be able to add hundreds od warheads per year and might be working up the capacity to reach over a 1000 warheads per year soon.

Also worth remembering that by 1950s the US warheads were already in hundreds of kilotons, requiring a lot of plutonium. And by the 1960s yields were often several megatons if not more. Today's warheads are not as large. (Back then even some tactical nukes such as ones on air to air missiles were 250 KT in yield, basically what ICBM warheads are today)
Yeah, ICBM production is by far the limiting factor, producing the warheads themselves doesn't seem hard. I think they should be massively ramping up the mobile fleet (TEL and rail) in parallel to fixed and that we haven't yet seen concrete signs of that is pretty dispiriting. TELs should be easy to build too so I don't understand why we haven't seen signs of those being churned out.
 

FairAndUnbiased

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Yeah, ICBM production is by far the limiting factor, producing the warheads themselves doesn't seem hard. I think they should be massively ramping up the mobile fleet (TEL and rail) in parallel to fixed and that we haven't yet seen concrete signs of that is pretty dispiriting. TELs should be easy to build too so I don't understand why we haven't seen signs of those being churned out.
Do you expect to be able to see new TELs? I mean they're in the middle of nowhere in restricted areas and camouflaged.

The whole point of the silos is so that there can never be questions of "maybe China doesn't actually have the capability".
 
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