Ch. 9: Crouching Tiger Serialization

The Great Underground Wall of China

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Question: How many nuclear warheads does China have stockpiled beneath its “Great Underground Wall”?

1.     30

2.     300

3.     3000

The truly scary part here is that it is difficult to know the answer to this question.  However, if the rumors and conjectures about China’s vaunted “Great Underground Wall” are even remotely true, China will likely win this nuclear warhead contest hands down – if not today, then certainly in the coming decades.  As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns: “Today, China is the only one of five original nuclear weapons states that is increasing its nuclear arsenal.”[i]

To understand the breadth, depth, and significance of China’s emerging nuclear warhead threat, it is useful to return to a little Missiles 101. In a nutshell, there are three main classes of missiles by range and reach for the world to worry about.

First and most forebodingly, there are the strategic missiles.  These are the long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles or “ICBMs” that form the backbone of a country’s nuclear strike and deterrence capabilities.  With a range of between 3,000 and 10,000 miles,[ii] the most sophisticated ICBMs are capable of reaching any point on the planet from any other point – say, from Szechuan Province to Los Angeles or from Minot, North Dakota to Beijing.

In contrast, tactical missiles have a range of usually less than 200 miles and are designed primarily for short-range battlefield applications.  As their big advantages, tactical missiles can provide deeper strikes than conventional artillery while being very difficult to defend against. 

Tactical missiles are also relatively cheap and can deliver anything from conventional high explosive or nuclear warheads to chemical or biological payloads – think the undear departed Saddam Hussein’s “scuds” as a prime example. 

Finally, theater missiles fill in the distance gap between strategic and tactical weapons.  They range from around 200 miles to more than 2,000 miles; and they are designed to hit targets literally “in theater” – meaning within the region of a country like China.  For example, China would use its theater missiles to strike targets in Guam, India, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea or Vietnam.

Besides the distinction of missiles by distance, it is also useful to think about how such missiles can be launched.  In the old days of the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States set their nuclear-tipped ICBMs into fixed-point “hardened” silos.   However, as technology has improved, fixed silos have become much easier to pinpoint from space with a Global Positioning System while silo-seeking missiles have become so accurate they can literally blow the doors off a fixed silo.  As a result, countries like Russia and China – the United States still lags far behind – have moved to a “whack a mole” system of mobile launch sites that makes it far more difficult for an enemy to take out their nuclear arsenals.

Finally, there is an important distinction between how the rockets that propel the missiles are fueled.  In the old days, this was strictly a liquid fuel game.  The problem with liquid-fueled rockets, however, is that they take a relatively long time to prepare for launch; and during that time, they are highly vulnerable to detection and being destroyed on the ground.  Solid fuel rockets, on the other hand, solve this problem as they can be launched within seconds or minutes; and they are also much safer and easier to store.

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Given this Missiles 101 checklist, let’s get back to our question of how China stacks up when it comes to its nuclear warhead capabilities.  But of course this question gets us back to the problem of a lack of transparency in China’s nuclear weapons program.  Such a lack of transparency is in sharp contrast to both the United States and Russia which have worked hard to use the arms control treaty process to reduce the prospects of nuclear war.