China ICBM/SLBM, nuclear arms thread

[ismellcopium]

https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/1ony3wj
Lol. Why does this read like the the only "intel work" Trump's CIA did was "we measured the

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sound after this test in their giant steel vessel all the way here from Langley, and it was 3.7x10^-12 dB instead of the expected 8.2x10^-13, therefore there must have been a yield!!" Or not even that, just "we see this thing on sat imagery, just a hunch but those sussy bakas must be up to no good inside".

Anyway hopefully Trump "responds" with a full scale test and everyone can stop playing this silly game of keeping the fission yield below 1 pound (lol) while testing.

 

[ismellcopium]

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Account of the DOE visit in 1990 was a nice read so I'll post it separately. Clearly the intent mainly was to signal to the US to take the Chinese weapons program more seriously, little other reason to invite DOE to Lop Nur while it was still an active site conducting detonations. Quite a few nice tidbits & wholesome moments. There's so much natural chemistry between the technical nuclear experts from either country both sides probably also hoped to get the other's guard down in conversation & glean some useful intel lol.

Hopkins: It was essentially everything that we were working on. It was clear that their physics of nuclear weapons was not all that far behind us. Their engineering was not so far along. In trying to make the nuclear weapons in the smallest size with the largest yield, using the smallest amount of materials—these were very difficult things that often took the best numerically controlled machines. The Chinese, in the 1990s, couldn’t do it. Today they can.

Hawkins: Since our visit, one of the things that they’ve done—that we haven’t done—is build modern production facilities. We know from things like satellite imagery that their plutonium pit production facilities are incredibly modern. They still want us to know, at least generally, how far along they are.

That also kind of reads to me like there's been progress in warheads more recently so the ones on ICBMs today may no longer be the ones last tested in the mid-90s ("535/575")?