Military watchers in recent years have made much of the rapid modernization of China’s military, focusing primarily on the introduction of new platforms, such as the J-20 stealth fighter and the refurbished Varyag aircraft carrier, or advances in missile technology, such as the Dong Feng-21D “carrier killer.” To a large extent, this is also what the US Department of Defense’s latest report on the Chinese military released last week zeroed in on.
However, since 1995, tens of thousands of soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have been working on a project that, to date, has attracted surprisingly little attention. That this is the case befuddles the mind, as this endeavor, first revealed in a 2008 CCTV documentary and confirmed by the PLA’s China Defense Daily in December 2009, has the potential to alter the strategic balance in the Pacific. Stunningly, the new Pentagon report only makes one brief mention of that development.
The project in question is a 5,000km tunnel, dubbed the “underground Great Wall,” which the Second Artillery has been digging in the mountainous regions of Hebei Province. The Second Artillery is in charge of China’s ballistic missile arsenal, including its strategic nuclear deterrent, though the latter falls under direct command of the Central Military Commission.
According to reports, the tunnel is being built to store China’s nuclear arsenal.
Officially, China has a “no first use” nuclear policy, meaning that its nuclear deterrent is contingent on its ability to sustain and survive a first strike. Given its reported depth of hundreds of meters underground, the tunnel would play a large role in ensuring China’s nuclear arsenal weathers an initial attack, even one that includes several nuclear weapons, so that it can counterattack.
Beyond survivability, the tunnel would make it far more difficult for US and allied imagery intelligence satellites to detect and locate China’s nuclear launchers. According to a recent study by the Union of Concerned Scientists on China’s nuclear capabilities, the Second Artillery has an arsenal consisting of about 155 nuclear warheads ready to be deployed on six types of land-based missiles (other estimates put the number of warheads at about 400).
Worryingly, it is not known whether China has installed what are known as Permissive Action Links devices that “lock” nuclear warheads until the proper codes have been provided, usually by the president, to ensure civilian control over nuclear weapons.
Once everything is stored underground, and given that China tends to decouple warheads from the missiles, it will be next to impossible to quantify China’s entire nuclear arsenal. Not only would 5,000km of storage allow for a greatly expanded arsenal, but transport capabilities within the tunnel could allow for the launch of nuclear weapons from a number of locations along the tunnel.
A speaker at the Asian Strategic Studies Conference in Newport, Rhode Island, earlier this month said that, based on bits of information he had pieced together, estimates of China’s nuclear inventory could be missing the mark by a wide margin (as with everything else concerning the PLA, the nuclear forces are shrouded in secrecy and ambiguity, forcing governments and analysts alike to make guesstimates). Any substantial increase in its arsenal would mean that Beijing’s limited deterrent is — or could become — far greater than what we have come to expect.
If this were to materialize, the entire strategic balance in Asia would be shaken and would inevitably force the US, the sole security guarantor in the region, to reassess how it calculates the risks and costs of intervention, such as during a crisis in the Taiwan Strait.
J. Michael Cole is deputy news editor at the Taipei Times.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they