New Nuclear Missile Installation Discovered in China

Satellite photos revealed a second site of completely new missile installations. China could be gearing up to challenge the U.S. in a balance of power in nuclear deterrent.

At NYT, "A 2nd New Nuclear Missile Base for China, and Many Questions About Strategy":

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 the Xinjiang region, 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.

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.

The mystery is why China’s strategy has changed.

There are several theories. The simplest is that China now views itself as a full-spectrum economic, technological and military superpower — and wants an arsenal to match that status. Another possibility is that China is concerned about American missile defenses, which are increasingly effective, and India’s nuclear buildup, which has been rapid. Then there is the announcement of new hypersonic and autonomous weapons by Russia, and the possibility that Beijing wants a more effective deterrent.

A third is that China is worried that its few ground-based missiles are vulnerable to attack — and by building more than 200 silos, spread out in two locations, they can play a shell game, moving 20 or more missiles around and making the United States guess where they are. That technique is as old as the nuclear arms race.

“Just because you build the silos doesn’t mean you have to fill them all with missiles,” said Vipin Narang, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who specializes in nuclear strategy. “They can move them around.”

And, of course, they can trade them away. China may believe that sooner or later it will be drawn into arms control negotiations with the United States and Russia — something President Donald J. Trump tried to force during his last year in office, when he said he would not renew the New START treaty with Russia unless China, which has never participated in nuclear arms control, was included...

Keep reading.