![]() ![]() It is understood dozens more weapons are stored at the base. The Haji Abad base has at least 14 of the latest Zolfagar or Dezful missiles that can be accurate to within 10 metres, carrying a 350 kilogramme warhead. The steep mountainside and particular slant of the seven silos strongly point to a limited direction that would cause concern for military airbases in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. The build-up is capable of "changing the world's nuclear balance," said Su, who is a Defense Ministry adviser.The imagery given to The National shows the bank of launch sites set into mountainous terrain close to the southern Iranian town of Haji Abad. Su Tzu-yun, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, said China has doubled its military spending from $100 billion to over $209 billion in the decade since Xi Jinping came to power.Īpart from China's warheads, its DF-41, DF-26 and JL-3 ballistic missiles, as well as its Type 094A submarine and projected H-20 strategic stealth bomber all point to the pursuit of a nuclear triad. Risk continues to rise in the region, Brown said, but the silos would not represent a "deep departure" from the increasing threat observers were already seeing. He also agreed with Lewis' "shell game" hypothesis, calling it a "good, cheap way to make more targets and increase survivability." Intelligence Community's prediction about China's intentions over the next decade. "China is going to vastly expand its nuclear arsenal, and there will be a lot more expansion past these silos."īrown said the research serves as confirmation of the U.S. "But I think the big thing is it doesn't necessarily represent some major shift from China's nuclear strategy either," he told Newsweek. Gerald Brown, a Washington analyst studying deterrence and Chinese nuclear forces, described the revelations by Eveleth and Lewis as a "shocking, large and rapid development." StatistaĪ September 2020 Pentagon report estimated China's nuclear stockpile to be in the range of the "low 200s." It noted Beijing's long-standing "no first use" policy, but said the conditions under which China would act outside of the policy was ambiguous. "We're stumbling into an arms race that is largely driven by U.S. first strike in sufficient numbers to defeat U.S. ![]() "We believe China is expanding its nuclear forces in part to maintain a deterrent that can survive a U.S. With the additional under-construction sites near Yumen, China looks to be building around 145 new missile silos, Lewis told The Washington Post, which broke the story as China marked the Communist Party's 100-year anniversary on July 1. "Yet whether the number is 12 or 120, this is an alarming development." We just don't know," he wrote in Foreign Policy. "So while it might seem that 120 silos means 120 missiles, it could very easily be 12. And the biggest issue for China has been the U.S. nuclear stockpile may be too simplistic.īut he noted: "China does make decisions about the size and composition of its nuclear forces in light of what the U.S. Lewis, whose program is located at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, argues that characterizing China's ICBM build-up as a direct response to the U.S. It involves obscuring the true location and quantity of one's nuclear arsenal by "shuttling a smaller number of missiles among a larger number of silos," he explained. "The big thing to emphasize is that we don't know that every silo will be armed with a missile," he told Newsweek.Ĭhina could be playing the "shell game," said Lewis, referring to a strategy the U.S. Planet/Center for Nonproliferation StudiesĪccording to Lewis, the excavations began in February, but China's exact intentions are still unclear. Satellite images studied by nuclear experts at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California revealed at least 119 under-construction missile silos and other related facilities in the desert of China's northwestern province of Gansu. ![]()
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