A 2nd New Nuclear Missile Base for China, and Many Questions About Strategy
Is China scrapping its “minimum deterrent” strategy and joining an arms race? Or is it looking to create a negotiating card, in case it is drawn into arms control negotiations?
By William J. Broad and David E. Sanger
In the barren desert 1,200 miles west of Beijing, the Chinese government is digging a new field of what appears to be 110 silos for launching nuclear missiles. It is the second such field discovered by analysts studying commercial satellite images in recent weeks.
It may signify a vast expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal — the cravings of an economic and technological superpower to show that, after decades of restraint, it is ready to wield an arsenal the size of Washington’s, or Moscow’s.
Or, it may simply be a creative, if costly, negotiating ploy.
The new silos are clearly being built to be discovered. The most recent silo field, on which construction began in March, is in the eastern part of Xinjiang province, not far from one of China’s notorious “re-education” camps in the city of Hami. It was identified late last week by nuclear experts at the Federation of American Scientists, using images from a fleet of Planet Labs satellites, and shared with The New York Times.
MONGOLIA
Hami reeducation camp
Hami missile site
Laser base for
firing on satellites
Jilantai silo
training area
Yumen missile silos
CHINA
Area of
detail
Beijing
CHINA
200 MILES
MONGOLIA
Hami reeducation camp
Hami missile site
Laser base for
firing on satellites
Yumen
missile silos
CHINA
Beijing
Area of
detail
CHINA
200 MILES
Source: The Federation of American Scientists and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies
By Scott Reinhard
For decades, since its first successful nuclear test in the 1960s, China has maintained a “minimum deterrent,” which most outside experts judge at around 300 nuclear weapons. (The Chinese will not say, and the U.S. government assessments are classified.) If accurate, that is less than a fifth of the number deployed by the United States and Russia, and in the nuclear world, China has always cast itself as occupying something of a moral high ground, avoiding expensive and dangerous arms races.
But that appears to be changing under President Xi Jinping. At the same time that China is cracking down on dissent at home, asserting new control over Hong Kong, threatening Taiwan and making far more aggressive use of cyberweapons, it is also headed into new territory with nuclear weapons.
“The silo construction at Yumen and Hami constitutes the most significant expansion of the Chinese nuclear arsenal ever,” Matt Korda and Hans M. Kristensen wrote in a study of the new silo field. For decades, they noted, China has operated about 20 silos for big, liquid-fuel missiles, called the DF-5. But the newly discovered field, combined with one hundreds of miles away in Yumen, in northeast China, that was discovered by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., will give the country roughly 230 new silos. The existence of that first field, of about 120 silos, was reported earlier by The Washington Post.
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