Chinese soldiers stand guard in front of a model of a nuclear warhead in a nuclear lab in China's northwestern Qinghai province. Photo: Xinhua
SCMP: Is China about to abandon its ‘no first use’ nuclear weapons policy?
* The growing US-China naval arms race is putting pressure on Beijing to reconsider its long-standing nuclear policy, analysts say
China might come under pressure to reconsider its long-standing “no first use” nuclear policy as it engages in a maritime arms race with the United States, analysts have warned.
Nuclear competition is brewing between the two countries as China makes gains in weapons development and Washington tries to limit Beijing’s military build-up in the South China Sea.
The United States is still decades ahead in nuclear weapons development but a successful test late last year of China’s new submarine-launched ballistic missile, the JL-3, is cause for concern in Washington.
The test signals that China is moving ahead with a new class of strategic submarines called SSBNs, vessels that could be equipped with nuclear-armed JL-3s and that would be more difficult to detect than conventional land-based nuclear weapons.
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WNU Editor: The Chinese military has changed in every-way in the past two decades. I expect that they will also change their nuclear policy on the how and when to use nuclear weapon in the future.
2 comments:
I don't believe China's nuclear weapons are ready accessible. Plenty of US and Russia nukes that could be disabled but China's relatively low number make them hard to locate. Using them on the other hand for a first strike potential would indicate them either digging them up or creating new ones.
what do you mean by "not ready accessible"?
they don't have to be. neither are the americans. typically a large percentage is stored underground or deep in mountains. A smaller percentage is kept "ready", another smaller part is located and ready (e.g. subs parking off Russia's coast and vice versa).. so China is estimated to have < 1,000 nukes.. at least that's what the intel community said about 5 yrs ago. Think 600 was the number, but with a large uncertainty range. So it could be 1k, could be 2k, could be 5k for all we know. It doesn't matter. One nuke that can be delivered reliably is plenty.
As I've pointed out before, US weakness is not their number of nukes, but their delivery platform and even more so their defense network. Even North Korea, with its shitty missiles and only 60 or so nukes, could - according to own US assessment of end of last year - have a handful of nukes (say 5 or so) land and devastate the US in the trillions. (of course North Korea would cease to exist as well, but all of North korea would not be worth 2 trillion.. but 5 nukes well placed in the US could cost the US - and the world - 30-50 trillion easy.
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