Waking Up To The Chinese Nuclear Threat
For decades, the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon have downplayed China’s nuclear weapons capabilities, saying the Chicoms retained a force of 200-300 warheads as a “minimum deterrent.”
Quietly, over the past five years they have changed those estimates.
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a non-governmental group, discovered what appeared to be a massive building program in July 2021 of underground ballistic missile silos in three separate locations.
To disguise the underground facilities from satellites, the Chinese erected giant inflatable air domes over the sites (55×75 meters each!) during the construction phase. Once the air domes were removed months later, FAS says that satellite imagery showed that seven-meter-wide missile silo hatch doors had been installed.
“With approximately 300 apparent silos under construction – a number that exceeds the number of ICBM silos operated by Russia – and an additional 100-plus road-mobile ICBM launchers, China’s total ICBM force could potentially exceed that of either Russia and the United States in the foreseeable future,” the FAS report concluded.
Let that sink in for a minute. All the U.S. arms control calculations have been based on parity between the United States and the Soviet Union, today the Russian Federation, at roughly 4000 warheads each. What if China had as many warheads as the Russians?
In March, the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, General Anthony Cotton, repeated estimates other Pentagon officials have put out over the past year that China will have 1000 strategic nuclear warheads by 2030, and 1500 by 2035.
But that is a lowball estimate, intended to keep from alarming the public.
Senator Roger Wicker repeated a phrase Cotton himself had used earlier that China was building its nuclear arsenal at “breakneck” speed.”
“Over the past three years, China has tripled the size of its nuclear arsenal and built an ICBM network larger than our own,” Wicker revealed.
The growing Chinese strategic nuclear weapons arsenal recently prompted the Biden administration to quietly update its nuclear war fighting strategy to focus more clearly on China, according to The NY Times.
The strategy is officially called the Nuclear Weapons Employment Planning Guidance, and is part of the Nuclear Posture Review that occurs every four years.
The last Nuclear Posture Review was issued in 2022. While the details are classified, it is released to Congress and the public so the overall guidelines are public.
The Nuclear Weapons Employment Planning Guidance is developed jointly by the Pentagon and the White House, since it is a guide for policymakers, not just the warfighters.
It makes for chilling reading. In it, the warfighters use an equation to estimate the number and size of nuclear weapons needed to reliably destroy the targets chosen by their political bosses.
They call it “Probability of Arrival”:
“Probability of arrival (PA) is the likelihood the weapon arrives and detonates in the target area, calculated as a product of weapon system reliability (WSR), prelaunch survivability (PLS), and probability to penetrate (PTP). The equation for planners is WSR x PLS x PTP = PA.”
Let me give you a real world calculation. Let’s say, because of reduced defense spending and poor maintenance, the reliability of our strategic nukes is at 85%. I’ll give them a 99% chance of surviving an enemy strike, but with the tremendous increases in missile defense systems in both Russia and China, I’ll give it a 60% of reaching the target.
That gives a Probability of Arrival of just 50%. In other words, we would need twice the number of nukes we have today in our arsenals just to take out Russian targets, and another 4,000 or so to neutralize China.
Those are truly chilling numbers. You can read the public version of the posture review here: https://www.acq.osd.mil/
Clearly the next administration is going to need to dramatically increase defense spending and tackle the Chinese nuclear arsenal head on.
I discuss this, as well as the horrible ten year anniversary of the ISIS takeover of the Christian heartland in Iraq’s Nineveh Plain, on this week’s Prophecy Today Weekend. As always, you can listen live at 1 PM on Saturday on 104.9 FM or 550 AM, or by using the Jacksonville Way Radio app.
Yours in freedom.
©2024. Kenneth R. Timmerman. All rights reserved.