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James collected a couple of articles on Yinhe incident for an October 2008 post entitled, The Yinhe Incident.

Worth revisiting.

A few days ago, CNN reported that a Chinese submarine had collided with the towed sonar array of a USN destroyer.

The AP now reports confirmation of the incident by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. The American side has yet to acknowledge it, according to Stars & Stripes.

Perhaps now would be a good time to start U.S.-Chinese talks on an incidents-at-sea agreement. Before the PLA Navy* sends nuclear weapons out to sea, that is.

X-posted from TW.

Gregory Kulacki and I often grouse about which portions of the Chinese arms control discussion get translated into English. (I grouse especially, since I can’t work in Chinese.)

Gregory has taken matters into his own hands, beginning a translation project. The first article he translated is An Investigation of China – U.S. Strategic Stability by Li Bin and Nie Hongyi. He also prepared a brief summary.

What is fascinating is how much more direct, in Chinese, Li and Nie are about the threat of nuclear weapons being nuclear coercion, not nuclear use.

General offense-defense theory and classic arms control theory are the same in assuming a nation selects behavior based solely on the magnitude of its interest. This is a bit different than the reality of strategic weaponry. Classic arms control theory predicts that when a nuclear country is going to lose a conventional war and does not worry about nuclear relation, the possibility saving the situation with a nuclear attack is great. But the Korean, Vietnam and Afghan wars all demonstrate that this prediction does not reflect actual conditions in international society. The theory of the nuclear taboo in constructivist theory postulates a norm in international society against the use of nuclear weapons, a norm known as the nuclear taboo. Under the conditions of this nuclear taboo, just because a country has the ability to carry out a preemptive nuclear attack does not mean they can carryout out this type of nuclear attack at will. However, the existence of the nuclear taboo does not prevent a nuclear weapon state from using the superiority of its nuclear weapons to engage in coercion. Consequently, the most direct result of a strategic imbalance is nuclear coercion.

This is, I think, the core difference in how Americans and Chinese talk about deterrence.

The difference is an important one — think about “no first use.” Americans think about the pledge as a hollow promise. After all, if you need to use them, you are going to do so no matter what you’ve said. On the other hand, if you think nuclear weapons are weapons of coercion, then forswearing their first-use does constrain your ability to use them to coerce.

I’ve observed the implicit difference before, but I’ve never seen it stated explicitly.

Late Update: Here is the Chinese language version.

How big is China’s nuclear stockpile?

Benn Tannenbaum sends along this quote from Ed Corcoran who provides, er, a rather large range of estimates:

China is neither ally nor adversary, but something in between. It is a nuclear power with a relatively modest arsenal of perhaps a couple hundred nuclear warheads, though some estimates do run over two thousand, together with some fifty missiles capable of reaching the United States.

“Two thousand?” Benn asked.

The 2,000 reference is based on an essay by a college student in Singapore that I thought I had thoroughly debunked more than four years ago.

Since it doesn’t seem to go away — despite a pretty rough treatment on the blog and in the pages of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (when the Bulletin had pages) — I thought I would revise that essay.

The short answer is that 2,000 is ridiculous.

How Many Chinese Nuclear Weapons Redux?
Originally published, December 2004 • Revised, May 2009

In 1996, a Singapore University student, Yang Zheng, posted a short essay online, entitled China’s Nuclear Arsenal, that concluded that “it is very likely that China is making 140-150 nuclear warheads a year and she has accumulated 2,350 nuclear warheads so far.”

By contrast, unclassified U.S. intelligence assessments at the time suggested that China “has over 100 warheads deployed operationally on ballistic missiles. Additional warheads are in storage.” Declassified documents from the 1990s place classified estimates of the total stockpile, including a small stockpile of aircraft -delivered gravity bombs, between 200 and 250 warheads.

The fact that Yang’s numbers were completely outside the bound of the possibility didn’t stop certain conservative “defense intellectuals” from citing the hell out of it:

• Richard Fisher, writing for The Heritage Foundation, cited it not once but twice — (the latter co-authored with Baker Spring). Fisher even claimed that “one U.S. government expert told this author that its estimates are plausible.”

• David Markov and Andrew Hull use Yang’s fissile material prodution and warhead estimates in an Institute for Defense Analyses study entitled The Changing Nature of Chinese Nuclear Strategy.

• David Tanks, then with the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, called the essay “convincingly argued”.

• The Center for Defense and International Security Studies also cites the essay to argue that an estimate by the Natural Resource Defense Council of approximately 400 warheads was “too low and thus inaccurate.”

Every single one of these people should be red-faced with shame. (And, I regret to add, this is not an exhaustive list of citations.)

The core of Yang Zheng’s argument is that estimates placing the Chinese arsenal at 2,000 plus warheads are “are reasonable” because “data from various U.S. intelligence agencies show that, in the mid-1980’s, China was producing at least 800 kilograms of U-235 and 400 kilograms of Pu-239 per year.”

That’s great, except the declassified data doesn’t show fissile material production at that level.

Just take a look at plutonium, production. A classified DOE estimate of Chinese plutonium production, leaked to the press, places Chinese Pu stockpile at 1.7-2.8 metric tons. This is consistent with unclassified estimates by Gronlund and Wright (2-5 metric tons) and Albright et al (4.8 metric tons). For more information, see my post Guangyuan Plutonium Production Reactor, November 9, 2006.

Assuming 3 to 5 kilograms of plutonium per warhead, 1.7-2.8 tons of plutonium could support a force of 340 to 930 weapons. If China uses substantially more than 5 kilograms per warhead, its stockpile might only support a few hundred weapons.

In fact, Yang’s dicussion of Chinese Pu and U-235 production facilities is wonderfully incompetent. Here is Yang’s table of Nuclear Explosive Material (NEM) facilities:

Facility	Pu or U235	kg/year
Lanzhou Gaseous Diffusion Plant	U235	400
Helanshan Centrifuge I	U235	400
Helanshan Centrifuge II	U235	???
Yumen Breeder Reactor	Pu	250
Baotou Breeder Reactor	Pu	150
Guangyuan Breeder Reactor	Pu	???

Reproduced from Yang Zheng, China’s Nuclear Arsenal, March 16, 1996. Reproduction does not imply endorsement.

These sites are simply wrong:

• Baotou isn’t a plutonium reactor but rather a Nuclear Fuel Element Plant. The Baotou Plant resembled a French-designed plutonium reactor from the air, leading US intelligence agencies to mis-identify it during the early years of the Chinese nuclear program (William Burr and Jeffrey Richelson discuss this error in “Whether To ‘Strangle the Baby in the Cradle’: The United States and the Chinese Nuclear Program, 1960-64.”)

• The list is missing a second gaseous diffusion plant at Heping.

• China didn’t have centrifuges at Lanzhou when Zhang wrote his post. (China did subsequently install leased-Russian centrifuge modules at Han Zhong and Lanzhou to enrich LEU to fuel reactors, but the first did not become operational until after 1996.)

An accurate list here.

Moreover, Yang Zheng doesn’t consider the operating histories of the facilities, which stopped producing enriched uranium in 1987 and plutonium in 1991. Serious problems with the facilities could have substantially reduced output—substantial operating problems are detailed in the official Chinese history of the program and probably account for the DOE classified estimate being lower than either unclassified estimate.

Examing the operating history of the reactors, of course, would require actual analysis. What Yang Zheng did, on the other hand, was to simply clean up and repost the uninformed rantings of an anonymous commenter on a message board in cyberspace.

That doesn’t suprise me — plenty of the online debate is uninformed and biased.

What does surprise me, however, is the number of so-called “experts” at allegedly respectable institutions — Heritage, IDA, IFPA, CDISS and others — who further cleaned up Yang Zheng’s rantings and presented them as fact.

These people should find a new line of work.

In October, I observed that the Chinese anti-ship ballistic missile was probably styled the DF-21 Delta, making it the fourth mod of the DF-21. (A journalist had referred to it as the DF-21 Charlie, which I think is just the plain vanilla conventionally-armed DF-21 variant).

Looks like I was right. A senior defense official dropped “DF-21 Delta” in a press briefing for Chinese Military Power:

SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Longer-range capabilities could include conventional ballistic missiles, both the short-range ballistic missiles like the ones that are deployed opposite Taiwan, but also longer-range, like conventional medium-range ballistic missiles, which is something that they’re working on, as well as the DF-21D, which is an anti-ship ballistic missile that they’re working on. That’s based on a CSS-5 medium-range ballistic missile air frame. Those are the types of things that we would consider, you know, disruptive in terms of longer-range capabilities.

I can hear the sound of Jeffrey rushing to book a plane ticket. Or at least asking his programme assistant to do so. From the NYT:

A senior Chinese naval officer said that China would unveil its nuclear submarines to the public on Thursday as part of an international review of the country’s naval fleet “aimed at promoting understanding about China’s military development,” according to a report by Xinhua, the state news agency.

The appearance of the submarines, in the northeastern port city of Qingdao, would be the first time that China had publicly shown the vessels. They are among the most powerful ships in the Chinese Navy.

The officer, Vice Adm. Ding Yiping, deputy commander of the Chinese Navy, told Xinhua in an interview on Monday that “suspicions about China’s being a ‘threat’ to world security are mostly because of misunderstandings and lack of understandings about China.”

He added, “the suspicions would disappear if foreign counterparts could visit the Chinese Navy and know about the true situations.”

The Guardian article on this story has perahps the funniest erratum I have ever seen:

This article was amended on Friday 24 April 2009. Due to an editing error, the original version of this article said that Chinese nuclear submarines had gained prominence in recent battles with Somali pirates. This has been corrected.

But, all is forgiven because of their pics.

The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies has published a new occasional paper published by (Engaging China and Russia on Nuclear Disarmament Occasional Paper No. 15, Cristina Hansell and William C. Potter, eds.) that includes a commissioned paper by yours truly.

The paper, Chinese Nuclear Posture and Force Modernization (pp 37-46), is something I have wanted to write for a while — it summarizes some of the arguments in the book and makes explicit other themes. It opens:

According to a recent U.S. government white paper, China “is the only major nuclear power that is expanding the size of its nuclear arsenal.” This claim is often invoked in the United States to imply that China’s military modernizations are somehow illegitimate or to raise questions about what darkness may lie in the hearts of China’s military and political leaders.

But what does the statement really mean? What are the technical, historical, and bureaucratic realities that have shaped China’s nuclear posture and drive its ongoing modernization? What do these realities say about China’s national security policy making? About how Chinese leaders view nuclear weapons, arms control, and disarmament? About the nature of the threat to the United States?

All of the other commissioned papers are really interesting. In terms of China, you probably already know J.D. Yuan. You probably don’t know Lora Saalman, but you should. Some people pretend to be able to speak Chinese, Lora is actually doing her doctorate at Tsinghua under Li Bin.

Seriously.

At the end of an article about the National Academies glossary project, Lionel Beehner in SEED Magazine mentions the trouble that beset the translation of my book into Chinese:

That means translation will likely remain a sensitive and sometimes contentious subject in US-China relations, especially in matters of science. Take American nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis’s 2007 book, The Minimum Means of Reprisal —  a title lifted from a Chinese official’s description of his government’s nuclear stance. When the book was translated into Chinese, its title became The Minimum Means of Revenge.

The story is true — although my Chinese is lousy, Gregory Kulacki pointed it out to me. (I was honored that the China Academy of Engineering Physics thought the book worth translating.)

The title comes from Marshal Nie Rongzhen, who explained his support for developing ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons in his memoir with the phrase: “有起码的还击手段.”

Beijing Review, which published excerpts of Nie’s memoir, and New World Press, which published an English-language version, made very different decisions about how to translate Nie’s phrase.

Beijing Review, in an article titled “How China Develops Its Nuclear Weapons” (April 29, 1985) , translated the phrase as “at least then, we could effectively counterattack.” New World Press, in an edition called Inside the Red Star: The Memoirs of Marshal Nie Rongzhen (1988, trans. Zhong Renyi), chose “we would have the minimum means of reprisal”.

I preferred the more literal “minimum means of reprisal” because the phrase is sonorous and describes the Chinese posture without using “deterrence” (威慑).

The word for deterrence, in Chinese, which carries a much stronger sense of “terror” than it does in English. Who even notices, in English, that the ter, in deter, is from the Latin terreo, “to frighten”? But I am told you can’t escape the root in Chinese. As a result, Chinese speakers don’t like to use “deterrence” to describe their posture.

This past year, the China Academy of Engineering Physics translated my book into Chinese. When the title — Nie’s phrase — was translated back into Chinese, the translator picked 最起码的报复手段 — with 报复 (“revenge”) replacing 还击 (to “fight back” or “retaliate”).

Again, my Chinese is lousy, but I am told that 报复 has a much more bloodthirsty quality than Nie’s original choice of 还击.

PS: If you are obsessed with translation issues, Adam Thirlwell had a wonderful article in The Believer.

I have a new toy: it’s called HyperCFD and it calculates a number of interesting quantities for bodies of rotation that are moving faster than the speed of sound. I bought it because I was interested in the stability of the “reentry body” associated with the DF-2 which Jeffrey used to discuss the design (and weight!) of the DF-2’s nuclear warhead but I imagine I will find other uses for it. As it is, I was very surprised at what I found out.

But first, I needed to check its accuracy against some actual data. (After all, it says it’s for amateur rocket designers, which didn’t instill the faith that perhaps it should have in me.) It turns out to be pretty good! (This plot shows the pressure distribution along the reentry vehicle at a fixed speed (Mach 5.8 in this case. I wont bore you with such checks, but you can look at it if you like. I should note that this fairly blunt shape is one of the most stressing for Newtonian approximations in computational fluid dynamics and in the study I’ve quoted, the other shapes are even better simulated by HyperCFD.)

I picked this particular plot to check HyperCFD with because it’s closely related to the sum of all the pressure on the reentry body. It’s important because, when you add it all up, you can calculate the point on the hypersonic body where all the pressure effectively acts. The resulting point on the body is called the center of pressure and it had better be behind the center of mass of a body if the shape is going to be aerodynamically stable.

Image a weathervane. It, of course, pivots around its central pole, which can be thought of as the center of mass of a free rocket or reentry vehicle. To a very good approximation, all the torque or turning force of wind can be thought of as acting at a single point: the “center of pressure,” or Cp. If the Cp is behind the center of mass, the rocket is stable and turns into the “wind.” If the Cp is in front of the center of mass, then the rocket or reentry body will flip. Funny thing is, that might not be stable either since the aerodynamics will change completely if the reentry vehicle is going in “butt end first,” if you will.

Which brings us to the DF-2 warhead. Several readers of Jeffrey’s post commented on the position of the center of mass of the warhead, as indicated by the balance point of the jig that is lifting the warhead. It turns out that the center of mass is too far back for a nose-first reentry and too far forward for a butt-end-first reentry! (And, in fact, the butt-end-first becomes even less stable as it slows down. Oh, yes, before I forget, the calculated Cp’s are definitely on the symmetry axis of the body and I assume that the CG is also, though it doesn’t really have to be.) So what does that mean? It’s obvious, actually.

It doesn’t separate from its rocket body, or if it does, it separates much farther back from the nose. Perhaps an even more interesting question is why so many of us thought it must separate. My guess is that when you see a separated warhead, you assume it separates during flight.

What’s next for HyperCFD? Jeffrey got interested in this warhead because it was reported to be the same design sold to the Libyans. This program provides a little more information for trying to constrain the nuclear devices potential proliferators might try. So I think I want to “design” a nuclear warhead to fit in the Shahab-3 and Shahab-3B warheads. But that is going to be a little while from now.

The National Academies is having a release party (ok, release event) for the English-Chinese, Chinese-English Nuclear Security Glossary.

I saw Ben Rusek and Wu Jun give a joint talk on the subject in Qingdao.

Be there or B ² Sorry, math joke.

The Committee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) of the U.S. National Academies, with its partner the Chinese Scientists Group on Arms Control (CSGAC) of the Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament, recently completed an English-Chinese Chinese – English Glossary of Nuclear Security Terms. This glossary of approximately 1000 terms is built on 20 years of CISAC CSGAC Track II discussions on nuclear arms control, nuclear nonproliferation, nuclear energy, and regional security issues and is intended to facilitate progress in diplomatic, academic, scientific, or other activities where unambiguous understanding is essential.

Speakers

Ming-Shih Lu, Committee Chair, Brookhaven National Laboratory (retired)
Richard L. Garwin, CISAC China Dialogue Chair, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, IBM Corporation (emeritus)
Raymond Jeanloz, CISAC Chair, University of California, Berkeley
Benjamin J. Rusek staff officer, CISAC

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

2:00PM – 4:00PM

Room 204, National Academy of Sciences Keck Building

500 5th Street, NW Washington, DC, 20001

Please RSVP for building security

Please RSVP by Fax: 202-334-1730 Phone: 202-334-2811 or Email: ybutt[at]nas.edu

The event is free and open to the public. Users who are unable to attend can access an on-line version of the glossary designed for English and Chinese speakers, and instructions on how to comment on the contents of the glossary at: http://www7.nationalacademies.org/cisac/Glossary_CISAC.html For additional information please contact: Ben Rusek at cisac[at]nas.edu or by phone at 202-334-2811