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.
In the US’ National Security Strategy (NSS) report released last month, US President Donald Trump offered his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The “Trump Corollary,” presented on page 15, is a distinctly aggressive rebranding of the more than 200-year-old foreign policy position. Beyond reasserting the sovereignty of the western hemisphere against foreign intervention, the document centers on energy and strategic assets, and attempts to redraw the map of the geopolitical landscape more broadly. It is clear that Trump no longer sees the western hemisphere as a peaceful backyard, but rather as the frontier of a new Cold War. In particular,
As the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) races toward its 2027 modernization goals, most analysts fixate on ship counts, missile ranges and artificial intelligence. Those metrics matter — but they obscure a deeper vulnerability. The true future of the PLA, and by extension Taiwan’s security, might hinge less on hardware than on whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can preserve ideological loyalty inside its own armed forces. Iran’s 1979 revolution demonstrated how even a technologically advanced military can collapse when the social environment surrounding it shifts. That lesson has renewed relevance as fresh unrest shakes Iran today — and it should
The last foreign delegation Nicolas Maduro met before he went to bed Friday night (January 2) was led by China’s top Latin America diplomat. “I had a pleasant meeting with Qiu Xiaoqi (邱小琪), Special Envoy of President Xi Jinping (習近平),” Venezuela’s soon-to-be ex-president tweeted on Telegram, “and we reaffirmed our commitment to the strategic relationship that is progressing and strengthening in various areas for building a multipolar world of development and peace.” Judging by how minutely the Central Intelligence Agency was monitoring Maduro’s every move on Friday, President Trump himself was certainly aware of Maduro’s felicitations to his Chinese guest. Just
On today’s page, Masahiro Matsumura, a professor of international politics and national security at St Andrew’s University in Osaka, questions the viability and advisability of the government’s proposed “T-Dome” missile defense system. Matsumura writes that Taiwan’s military budget would be better allocated elsewhere, and cautions against the temptation to allow politics to trump strategic sense. What he does not do is question whether Taiwan needs to increase its defense capabilities. “Given the accelerating pace of Beijing’s military buildup and political coercion ... [Taiwan] cannot afford inaction,” he writes. A rational, robust debate over the specifics, not the scale or the necessity,
RSS