ArmsControlWonk.com

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These two views show a target warhead 350 km directly above the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 7:45 pm (local time) on 11 January 2010. The image on the left shows what the target warhead (with an altitude of 350 km) would see if it looks at the Sun and the right shows the geometry of the Sun, Earth, and target warhead at at that instant.

I am starting to conclude that the “eyewitness” to the Chinese missile defense test is probably real, the reported time (7:45 pm, “local time”) is reasonable, and the target vehicle was most likely a relatively short range missile such as the DF-21. The slower the target vehicle, the more reasonable the streak seen on the camera phone’s image becomes. One very important question can still be addressed: was the target illuminated by the Sun? The answer to this question is vastly important. If the target could not be illuminated by the sun, it would mean that the Chinese have developed much more sophisticated infrared sensors than they have flown previously. If, on the other hand, it could be illuminated by the sun, perhaps by selecting an intercept point high enough for the sun to illuminate the target, then we are not forced to conclude a dramatic improvement in IR technology.

7:45 pm sounds pretty late at night. (Especially during the winter!) However, we must not forget that China is a very large country that uses a single time zone. That means that when it is 7:45 pm in Beijing, it is also 7:45 pm local time at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center almost 1,400 km west. On 11 January 2010, that corresponded to11:45 UTC. How high up would the target have to be to still be illuminated by the Sun?

At that time, the Sun was 17.4 degrees below the horizon at Jiuquan SLC. It’s a simple exercise in geometry to show that an object needs to be at an altitude of 305 km or greater if it is to be illuminated by the Sun. That is easily achievable by a DF-21 flying a maximum range trajectory.

I suppose that some people will still want to believe that China has achieved a quantum leap in IR technology. I cannot prove them wrong. However, I believe that such improvements come in systematic ways; especially if the developing country wants to master the technology for the long term. This test is still consistent with the Chinese hit-to-kill technology using a visible light tracker.

Comment [4]

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I’ve been working on a rather long piece about the recent Chinese Ballistic Missile Defense test but persistent reports of an eyewitness (complete with photos) have sidetracked me. These reports purport to be from a Chinese citizen who appears to have witnessed multiple flashes/explosions. (The original English translation seems to have disappeared, luckily I printed it out to pdf, which can be viewed here.) The question is: are these credible reports/photos?

For the moment, let us assume the photograph is associated with the interception. What could it be? My guess is that it is not the initial interception. The eyewitness seems to have watched a number of phenomena in the sky before taking out his cell phone and taking a picture. (That is certainly believable. In fact, it would be too incredible a coincidence for him to capture the interception.) Also, the first things he witnessed do not appear to have been the plume from the interceptor rocket. He certainly would have reported an initial streak of light if that had been the case rather than “moons” appearing.

Instead, the image above could be a large fragment from the target burning up in the atmosphere as it reenters. Using a typical camera phone field of view of 50 degrees implies that the streak is about 1 arc second long. If it originates at about 50 km altitude—somewhere around the altitude where the atmosphere starts to get fairly dense—then that corresponds to about 0.8 km long. Of course, it has been foreshortened by some unknown amount.

For the moment, and for the sake of continuing to speculate, let us assume there is no foreshortening. We might expect a target velocity (depending on the unknown range of the target rocket) to be somewhere between 3 and 6 km/s. With no foreshortening, that implies a “shutter” time of between 0.15 to 0.3 seconds. (Shorter range target rockets would imply longer shutter times.) I’m not an expert on cell phone cameras, but that seems to be somewhat longer than I would expect possible. (Readers?) The inevitable foreshortening would lengthen that shutter time still further and assuming a higher altitude would imply an even longer shutter time. These same arguments rule out this being an image of the initial interception. So the credibility question comes down to: how long does a cell phone camera integrate over a scene at night?

There is still some wiggle room here. I need to try to calculate where in its trajectory (ie what altitude) a piece of debris would become visible but my initial reaction— subject to a lot of further work —is that this is not directly associated with the interception. It is still possible that it is a piece of debris burning up.

Comment [11]

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The most recent satellite reported to be joining China’s constellation of Beidou navigation satellites is shown in yellow. An example of a geostationary Beidou satellite is shown in white and China’s one and only navigation satellite in a medium Earth orbit (MEO) is shown in green.

The launch of what is reported to be a seventh Chinese navigation satellite (on 16 January 2010) provides an opportunity to review what we know about this system of satellites. First, it is clear that the satellite, which has yet not been officially designated a Beidou satellite on the NASA space-track website (at least as of 12 noon, 18 January 2010), is intended to be a geostationary satellite. It, and the third stage of the CZ-3 launch vehicle, are in a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), as the image above shows. Within a few days of launch, the satellite’s apogee motor will fire, positioning the satellite in to its final orbital.

If the case of Beidou 1D is any indication, we will not know which satellite it is replacing until China moves it into position. China, as a responsible spacefaring nation, moved Beidou 1D into a supersync orbit just days after the launch of its replacement satellite, Beidou G-2. Beidou 1D as only about two years old when China replaced it with what is reported to be a second generation Beidou satellite. That is somewhat surprising since Beidou 1 was over six years old at the time and one might have expected it to be replaced before the much younger 1D. If China decided to replace 1D because it was failing, they must have had plenty of warning since they were still in control of that satellite.

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Current Beidou Constellation is shown (at the top) with the ground tracks for three orbits for each satellite projected onto the Earth’s surface; (lower left) an equatorial view of the satellites; (lower right) a polar view of the constellation. Note the Beidou 1D’s ground track shows both a large longitudinal displacement over three days and a large inclination—the up and down motion of the ground track. Dates indicated are the launch date of each satellite.

China’s first generation of navigational satellites did not have an onboard atomic clock. That, of course, complicated their operation and limited the number of users. Instead of broadcasting their own timing, as GPS satellites do, the satellite operated as a “bend in a pipe” with the time standard generated on Earth and, in fact, the “user” position determined by a central location after a round trip of radio signals from the center to the satellite to the user and back. It would be very interesting to know if the second generation satellites had their own space qualified atomic clocks.

With this latest satellite, we are also starting to see a pattern in Beidou launches. About every three years (2000, 2003, 2007, 2009*, 2010) a new wave of satellites is plugged into the constellation. (The asterisk for 2009 indicates that this launch might well have been accelerated to replace a dying satellite.) That might indicate the length of time it takes to design and/or build a new satellite. If it includes design time, I would expect evolutionary changes; something we might expect from China in any case given their known history of systematic development.

Comment [6]

On January 11, 2010, China conducted a test on ground-based midcourse missile interception technology within its territory. The test has achieved the expected objective. The test is defensive in nature and is not targeted at any country. (Xinhua File Photo)

Greetings from Andalo.

China announced that it has conducted a missile defense test. The announcement was very brief:

BEIJING, Jan. 11 (Xinhua) — On January 11, 2010, China conducted a test on ground-based midcourse missile interception technology within its territory. The test has achieved the expected objective. The test is defensive in nature and is not targeted at any country.

The Foreign Ministry Spokesperson made slightly more detailed comments, including noting that “The test would neither produce space debris in orbit nor pose a threat to the safety of orbiting spacecraft.”

That China might move some of its “hit to kill” research into the missile defense arena is hardly surprising — Geoff Forden has a post appropriately titled, Told you so.

I am surprised, however, at how smoothly the Chinese have handled the announcement. China is handling this test completely differently than the January 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test — though it is possible the system is the same. In January 2007, China was silent for nearly two weeks following the test, including five days of awkward silence after word leaked to Arms Control Wonk and Aviation Week and Space Technology.

In the aftermath of that debacle, Gregory Kulacki and I were told, and wrote in the Nonproliferation Review, that China had instituted a new procedure for vetting “future tests of potentially sensitive technologies with significant international consequences”:

In the wake of the test many foreign governments criticized the Chinese government for authorizing the test, for not informing them before hand, for failing to respond to requests for clarification, and for blithely dismissing the potential impacts on the future peaceful use of space. Chinese leaders in both the Foreign Ministry and Central Military Commission have struggled to cope with the intensity of the international reaction and the failure of their subordinates to anticipate and respond effectively to foreign inquiries and concerns, a dysfunction that continued for months. A long-planned conference of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, scheduled to be held in Beijing in April 2007, three months after the test, was abruptly canceled without explanation just days before it was scheduled to begin. In retrospect, the Party leadership maintains (and multiple sources confirm as accurate) that the relevant agencies, military and civilian, failed to coordinate well. Somewhere along the line the paper stopped flowing, and responsible individuals at the lower levels of the bureaucracy who had no prior knowledge of the program or the decision to go forward with the test but who did have responsibility for crafting and delivering the post-test message never got their instructions.

[snip]

There seems to be no dispute about the profoundly negative consequences of the Chinese government’s long-delayed response to the unanticipated, intense, and immediate international reaction to the ASAT test. All our sources agree that the delay reflected a significant breakdown in coordination within the Foreign Ministry, and between the Foreign Ministry and the military. In the wake of this failure, according to one source, the leadership will institute a new interagency review process that will be applied to future tests of potentially sensitive technologies with significant international consequences.

It looks like that procedure was in place, and worked very well in this case.

- China announced the test itself, rather than letting the US officials leak the information to Craig Covault at AvWeek.

- China had a prepared Foreign Ministry spokesperson ready to deliver talking points, rather than waiting almost five days to confirm the test with a not very convincing statement.

- China described the test as for missile defense — though it is not clear whether China flew an interceptor against a target — which is very difficult for the United States to criticize, especially in a week in which the US announced the sale PAC-3 interceptors to Taiwan.

- And, for good measure, China made sure to point out that the test “would neither produce space debris in orbit nor pose a threat to the safety of orbiting spacecraft.”

This is progress, though not exactly the sort I had hoped for.

It Might Not Have Been An HQ-9

I suspect this was the same sort of interceptor used in January 2007, though that is simply a guess at this point. (The reference to space debris, however, strikes me as particularly notworthy link to January 2007.)

Xinhua carried the announcement with the above photo — of an HQ-9 air defense missile [of a Chinese air defense missile]. Some colleagues have assumed (quite reasonably) that the test must, therefore, have used [Chinese air defense missile, such as the] HQ-9 missile, which in many ways resembles the Russian S-300 air-defense missile.

I would not/not, however, conclude China used an HQ-9 on the basis of this image. The caption, which I have reproduced with the image, describes it as a “file photo” and the Xinhua photo gallery contains file photos of an HQ-9, an HQ-12 and a DF-21C.

One thing I notice about the statement and selection of pictures is that the Chinese government has gone to great lengths to appear to be providing information, but there really is nothing there at all about the interceptor, the objective of the test, and so forth.

China really could have tested anything at all, though my default assumption would be that the missile defense test mirrored the January 2007 ASAT test and its predecessors.

Spread of Hit to Kill Technologies

The event in China is interesting in light of another recent development: India has announced its ABM program will be expanded to include an anti-satellite program.

While China is migrating its anti-satellite research into the missile defense arena, India is doing the opposite. In both cases, however, the technology is fundamentally the same: the development of kinetic energy interceptors — so called “hit-to-kill” technologies that use a bullet to hit a bullet.

In 2007, I tried to make the argument that we were making a mistake to focus on “anti-satellite” weapons — which is a mission. The real danger was the increasing availability of the specific technology — hit-to-kill — that would inevitably spread for both missile defense and anti-satellite applications:

First, once uncommon hit-to-kill technologies are now at the early stages of spreading around the world. Second, the broad focus on space weapons and ASAT technologies, many of which are quite unrealistic and exotic, distracts from the technological challenge posed by the proliferation of hit-to-kill systems. Third, partial arms control measures, such as a ban on kinetic ASAT testing, may mitigate the most threatening aspects of hit-to-kill technology while avoiding some of the difficulties associated with more comprehensive agreements.

I think that is precisely where we are today: The US has pioneered a technology — and encouraged its spread to allies like Israel, Japan and Taiwan among others. Now China and India are racing to join the club. The result, I think, is going to be a significant increase in the vulnerability of space assets.

Upated | 12:49 pm Sean O’Connor, judging by the TEL, suggests that the missile is a Chinese S-300 rather than an HQ-9. Looking at images from the National Day parade and rehearsal, the TEL seems to look different. The most likely candidate is an S-300, but I can’t find a really reliable picture. And, frankly speaking, I haven’t spent much time staring at Chinese air defense missiles, though I suspect that is about to change. Comments are invited.

Comment [42]

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Slide from a talk I gave on Capital Hill (sponsored by the AAAS) in March 2008.

Media reports today indicate that China has tested “ground-based midcourse missile interception technology.” Details necessary for evaluating exactly what system has been tested have not emerged yet. Nevertheless, it bolsters a prediction I made soon after the 2007 ASAT test: that China would continue testing its hit-to-kill technology in the form of a missile defense system. After all, there is no functional difference between an ASAT and a missile defense system; the closing speed is the only important parameter for classifying any exoatmospheric interceptor.

Comment [8]

This video is just a little more interesting than watching paint dry—until you realize that it is sound causing that little bright dot in the center! Sonoluminescence, light emitted by a plasma created at the center of a converging spherical sound wave, can be yours for about $100. Here are the instructions and here is a Scientific American article on the phenomena, which is closely related to the UD3 neutron generator.

I’ve been thinking about a small detail involving UD3 imitators ever since Jeffrey first published his very interesting post showing A. Q. Khan in front of a blackboard detailing Pakistan’s bomb design: why uranium deuteride? The uranium doesn’t participate in the nuclear aspects of the neutron generation, so why use it? I’m still not convinced I’ve understood the reasons behind this choice of material but the process of trying to understand it has been very enlightening.

Of course, one answer might be purely practical: there’s a whole bunch of uranium sitting in a bomb not doing anything until the first burst of neutrons is generated. Why not use it in the initiator? Such practical considerations undoubtedly do play an important role. But uranium has a very nice property that deuterium gas, for instance, does not: it’s very massive, an important consideration for shock compression. That mass, and how it’s packaged, might play a critical role in generating the pressure spike that compresses and heats up the deuterium to the 12 million degrees as reported in the Chinese paper.

What potential benefits does that mass bring to the initiator? The internal energy caused by the shock of the collision at the center of the device is proportional to the density of the material. Not the density of deuterium alone, but the total mass density. And the change in internal energy is also proportional to the shock pressure associated with this collision, which is much, much more intense than the shockwave that propagated through the UD3 to get it accelerating toward the center.

I’ve been trying to guess how fast that initial shock velocity was; another thing the Chinese paper—by not fully describing their experimental set up (they only give the outer radius of the high explosive as 8 cm)—has managed to conceal. I’ve estimated it as between 7 and 17 km/s, depending on how big the air gap between the aluminum and steel liner and the core really is. (The particle velocity is less than that.) One possible measure of just how important the uranium mass is comes from the paper reviewing Kaliski’s experiments using D2 gas, as pointed to by Robert Cross in Jeffrey’s original post. Through a fairly complex apparatus for focusing the shockwaves from a shaped charge (complicated if you wanted to place it next to a nuclear weapon’s pit, that is), Kaliski reported a particle velocity striking the deuterium gas of 50 km/s. Needless to say, the smaller the required velocity of the “strike,” the easier it should be to cause fusion.

But It’s More Than Just the Mass

Of course, just because deuterium is bonded to uranium doesn’t mean the compound has a high density. The theoretically maximum density of UD3 is about 11 g/cc; still quite dense if considerably less than the 19 g/cc for uranium metal. But that 11 g/cc is for a monolithic crystal. This is where material engineering really comes into play. You can increase the shock pressure—a seemingly important factor for increasing the final temperature—by increasing the density of the material. But you can also increase the temperature by making it more porous. In the language of shockwaves, you are increasing the change in “specific volume” (which is just the inverse of the density) as the material is crushed by the shock. This crushing, or compression, performs work on the material and heats it up. (That’s why the sonoluminescence experiment mentioned above needs a bubble in the center.) A monolithic crystal of UD3 would have a high pressure associated with the collision but not much work would be done—because of the relatively small compression associated with the solid crystal—and hence would not produce much of an increase in temperature. The Chinese, on the other hand, used a material with an initial density of 6 g/cm^3, which I assume is in the form of a sintered powder.

The effects of increasing the porosity of a material has been well documented in the open literature. Furthermore, increases in temperature appear to increase with increasing density of the porous metal’s “parent material” (bulk copper, for instance, is the parent material of copper powder). But most reproducible results involve temperature changes less than 10,000 K; about a factor a thousand less than the Chinese report. Of course, it is possible that the results mentioned in the literature were based on bulk temperatures and the fusion-type environments only happen over a very small volume that can only be measured by looking for the fusion-induced neutrons. (Just to be clear, I’m purposely grasping at straws here.) On the other hand, the Chinese measured a maximum of 48 neutrons in their detector and “corrected” that value by a whopping big factor to infer a yield of 50 thousand neutrons. To make maters worse, I saw nothing in the Chinese paper to indicate that they measured the effects of setting off 252 high speed detonators close to the sensitive preamps attached to their barium fluoride proportional counters. That might cause a lot of ringing in the signals.

Figure from the Chinese paper. After reading their caption, try saying “preamp noise” to see how that fits. (The darker black areas are in the original article.)

At the end of this process, I still don’t know why it is uranium deuteride. Can such high density materials like uranium be used to provide exactly the right balance between the two countervailing needs: high shock pressure and crushability? Or is UD3 a red herring and that famous (or infamous?) blackboard photograph an instance of carefully constructed of misdirection? As you might have guessed, I’ve become increasingly skeptical about the possibility of using UD3 as a source of fusion neutrons initiated by conventional explosives.

Note on Proliferation: I’ve tried mightily to extract the UD3 shock Hugeniot from the Chinese paper and haven’t figured out a way of doing it. Through a carefully selected set of information actually published, I think the Chinese have managed to convey their results without creating a proliferation problem since that Hugeniot is really what you need to design an initiator. However, just because I can’t do it doesn’t mean it is impossible so I agree with Jeffery’s decision not publish the paper here. This, of course, just propagates the problems arising from censoring science: a lack of full peer review etc.

I’d like to thank Prof. Andrew Higgins for pointing me to a number of important papers in the literature and helpful pointers as I tried to understand this issue. I highly recommend one of Andrew’s suggestions: Paul Cooper’s “Explosive Engineering” Of course, any mistakes I’ve made here are entirely mine.

Appendix: Hugoniots “Explained”

Once again, it has been pointed out to me that I’m way too techno-wonky on this one and failed to explain what a Hugoniot is. Of course, the best way to learn about them would be to read chapters 14 through 17 from Explosives Engineering. (Don’t worry, the book is excellent and you can jump in right to those chapters, which give a very readable physical explanation of shock waves. They get progressively more “mathy” but its all algebra and I urge you to work through them. If you don’t feel like that, just read Chapter 14, which doesn’t use any math at all.) But for the skinny, let me say that a material’s response to shocks can be characterized almost entirely by one graph and that graph can, for most materials, be characterized by a single number. The graph is a plot of the shock velocity vs. the velocity of the particle and the single number is the slope of that line in what is, in most cases, a straight line. This is called the U-u Hugoniot and other Hugoniots associated with the material are simply derived from it.

As you might expect, a shock wave, which is just a pressure wave has a higher velocity that the particles that get accelerated by the shock as it pass over them. But once the these parameters have been determined, it can be used to plot the same Hugoniot line but in terms of different variables, all of which are related to the original line by the laws of physics. In particular, you can plot the pressure of the shock wave verse the “specific volume,” the inverse of the density. This plot is important because the area under a line drawn from the initial, unshocked state, to the state after the shock wave has passed through is equal to the internal energy of the material. In our case here, by increasing the porosity of the material, we have increased the area under the graph and hence the total internal energy. A word of warning: the temperature is different from the total internal energy.

An example of a typical Hugoniot where pressure is plotted against specific volume (i.e. the inverse of density). The area under the Raleigh line is equal to the shock induced internal energy (including potential energy stored in chemical bonds of compressed materials.)

Comment [53]

This has taken me a couple of days to get to, but Hans Kristensen penned a nice post (China’s Noisy Nuclear Submarines) about China’s new Type 094 ballistic missile submarine, based on an Office of Naval Intelligence document entitled The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy: A Modern Navy with Chinese Characteristics.

Three things stand out:

1. China now has three ballistic missile submarines, one Xia class and two Jin class.

2. One Jin class submarine is based at Hainan. The other Jin and the Xia are at Qingdao.

3. The Jin is really frickin’ noisy.

The last point is something we suspected, but it is nice to see in black and white — or, in this case, in full color.

How Loud is China’s New Boomer?

The most interesting informtion in the ONI slickee is a nice chart showing the relatively loudness of Chinese and Russian nuclear submarines.

Which is more or less what we thought when we did an estimate in July 2007. (See How Capable is the 094?) This is actually the second chart that ONI has released showing the relative detectability of Chinese and Russian nuclear submarines. The first chart, released in 1996, was a nice x-y plot showing radiated noise by deployment year:

Source: Worldwide Submarine Challenges 1996, Office of Naval Intelligence. Note: The “1997 edition” is online but doesn’t seem to have this chart; the image is from the 1996 copy. I incorrectly stated it was from the 1997 edition in a previous post.

When one compares the 1996 ONI chart with a similar chart (below) from Tom Stefanick’s Strategic Antisubmarine Warfare and the Naval Strategy, China’s Type 093 or Shang-class SSN seems to clock in at 130-150 decibels (re 1 micropascals at one yard. Since the Jin-class is derived from the Shang, all things being should be a little louder, this worked as a conservative estimate for both.

(In case you like reading the fine print, 1 micropascal is the standard reference pressure for measuring sound in water. Don’t get me started on root mean square.)

Of course, the 1996 ONI chart was before the Shang and Jin class went to sea, so it was a projection. To add to the uncertainty, I was eyeballing the chart, which is not exactly a precise approach.

As it turns out — based on the new ONI chart, which I’ve turned on its edge — I would revised upward the loudness of the Jin class submarine to perhaps 140-160 dB re1 µPa at 1 yard. (I would revise upward even more the Shang, which is surprisingly loud.)

It is difficult to convert this in to an easily understandable measure of detection, but it seems that Chinese ballistic missile submarines lay along the same displacement/noise curve as Soviet-era ballistic missile submarines. (“As submarines grow quieter, they tend to grow in size to acommodate the sound isolating mounts,” wrote Stefanick.) The most obvious comparison for the Jin class SSBNm, in terms of size and noise, is the Soviet Delta 1 — which is not a flattering comparison.

Operational Patterns?

Overall, the Jin is a very impressive submarine — for the 1960s.

Which brings up other questions of what sort operational pattern would you develop to operate a ballistic missile submarine that makes one hell of a racket?

I continue to be skeptical that China will adopt the “continuous at sea deterrent” posture favored by the United States, United Kingdom and France. China could do so, of course, but it would probably require additional submarines and would be a very big organizational change for the Chinese military. (See: Will China’s Deterrent Go To Sea?)

The Western model is not the only one. Russia, for instance, does not routinely patrol its ballistic missile submarines. Here is a chart of Russian SSBN patrols by year released by ONI, and kindly provided by Hans Kristensen:

Russian SSBN Patrols by Year

1998	1999	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008
11	7	6	1	0	2	2	3	5	3	10

It is worth noting, furthermore, that in 2006, the patrols clustered, meaning that even in high years, deterrent patrols may not be continuous.

Of course, Russian SSBNs sitting pier-side are within range of US targets, while Chinese SSBNs are not. (Moreover, the Russians seemed to have developed the ability to launch from pier-side, which may not be a capability that interests the geographically-distant Chinese.)

So what kind of operational pattern might China adopt for its boomers? This is pure speculation, but I continue to think that the Chinese might choose to keep their submarines largely in port other than for training missions and “flush” them to sea in crisis to demonstrate “resolve.”

No, I don’t think that is a good idea. But Chinese officials think about deterrence primarily as having capabilities and, in a crisis, of signaling resolve. Moreover, Chinese boomers probably maximize survivability when they head out to sea with many other submarines to occupy the US Navy.

I don’t blame analysts for trying to make informed guesses about what the Chinese are going to do — it is really anybody’s guess. The Chinese themselves may not know. (Or, to put it another way, certain groups may have preferences but don’t know whether they will get their way.)

We will see soon enough.

One data point to track is the force size: ONI predicted five submarines on the assumption of “continuous at sea deterrence.” (Chinese Military Power continues to hedge it bets with “up to” five.) In 1999, DIA predicted just three by 2020 – a refitted Xia and two Jin. More than two years after spotting a pair of Jin class submarines side-by-side, that is where the China’s SSBN force happens to be.

Does this mean the decade-old DIA projection was correct? Or is it just a coincidence, like a stopped watch being right twice, while the Chinese outfit more hulls as predicted by ONI? It is impossible to tell from the open source information.

Comment [15]

Lots of good stuff coming in the next couple of days, so stay tuned.

I noticed that that GoogleEarth now has a June 2008 image of Mianyang, home to China’s weapons design and fabrication facilities, and which I visited in 2007. (The city, not the design and fabrication facilities.)

31°27’42.76“N, 104°44’27.25“E

Using GoogleEarth, I think I managed to find the statue of Deng Jiaxian (above), my hotel, and, of course, Science City.

Here are the placemarks.

Comment [3]

Update | 12:42 November 3, 2009 As if on cue, Michael Wines in the New York Times ledes Qian’s obituary with the grossly inaccurate statement that Qian “single-handedly led China’s space and military rocketry efforts.” No, he didn’t. Not single-handedly, at least.

Qian Xuesen — often called the “father of China’s space and missile programs” — has died. He was 98.

The late Iris Chang wrote a wonderful biography of Qian, Thread of the Silkworm, which I heartily recommend.

Qian was a more complicated figure in the development of China’s space program than mere partrimony suggests. Gregory Kulacki and I, in our monograph A Place for One’s Mat, argued that Qian’s legacy is profound, if mixed:

The historical accounts also shed light on the role of certain personalities. Qian Xuesen is rightly lauded as the “father” of China’s space program. But from the historical accounts, he emerges as a more complex, human figure than in English-language accounts. Qian is, first and foremost, a cheerleader, pressing China’s leaders to consider the possibilities of interplanetary spaceflight even as China endured one of the worst famines in human history. In some cases, Qian’s enthusiasm may have undermined China’s space development. In other cases, he was essential to move the bureaucracy. In the United States, a certain mythology has grown up around Qian, suggesting that, were it not for his deportation from the United States, China might not have developed missiles and satellites. Qian was undoubtedly a major figure linking the scientists and engineers to the political leadership. But Qian, for all his technical skill, was not the principal designer of any of China’s rockets or satellites. Dozens of other Chinese scientists, many of them trained in the United States, made invaluable contributions. American myths about Qian reflect views about “great men” in history, as well as the debates about McCarthyism, not Qian’s role in China’s space program.

This is a carefully worded paragraph. I recommend the entire monograph to get a sense of the role that Qian played. (Peter Brown observes our portrayal put Qian in a somewhat different light than Chang. I am happy to let readers judge for the themselves.)

Our conclusions are based, in part, on a two volume set of Qian’s correspondence that Gregory hauled back from China:

钱学森. 钱学森书信选 1956.2 -1991.12. 国防工业出版社, 2008.
钱学森. 钱学森书信选 1992.1 -2000.7. 国防工业出版社, 2008.

Comment [2]

Readers may remember when I popped over to Yverdon-Les-Bains this summer to attend an EastWest Institute Meeting on Reframing Nuclear De-Alert. It was a very interesting meeting with an outstanding cast of characters. Oh, and thermal baths.

The estimable Walter Pincus had some very nice things to say about the report in the The Washington Post, but unfortunately fixated on this section:

One enlightening section of the study points out how other nuclear-armed states handle operational status. China keeps an estimated 30 strategic systems on high alert, according to the study. It identified 12 as liquid-fueled ICBMs with two-megaton warheads “ready to launch in approximately 30 minutes,” and 18 solid-fueled ICBMs “in silos on a 20-minute alert.”

Just to be clear, the report says the opposite — that China’s forces are on low alert. The section that Pincus quotes is a dissenting view, offered by one of the Russian participants. Here is the full-text of the passage from the report:

As seen in the previous section, both Russia and the United States believed that keeping a large portion of their strategic forces on alert is essential to deterrence and strategic stability. China, on the other hand, is said to keep a portion of its missiles on low alert with the warheads separated. Even during the Cold War, Chinese ICBMs would sit in their silos unfueled and without their warheads. China thus seems to be willing to live with this seeming vulnerability even though it is not clear if the situation is likely to last. The reasons for this relaxed deployment may be partly technological (China may not possess the counterforce capabilities of the U.S. and Russian variety) and partly organizational (the scientific establishment rather than the military has traditionally exercised more influence in nuclear weapons development and deployment). However, the most important reason may be political, as nuclear weapons are viewed as weapons of coercion and not use. The mere fact of possession creates parity and achieves almost all the deterrence China desires.

During the discussions another view of China’s deployment was presented. Per this view, even though China may not possess nuclear war fighting capabilities on par with Russia and the United States, it does have a small number of strategic systems on high alert twenty-four hours a day. The 2nd Artillery, in charge of nuclear weapons, may have thirty ICBMs on continuous alert, including twelve liquid-fueled DF5s with 2-megaton warheads ready to launch in approximately thirty minutes as well as eighteen solid-fueled DF31 missiles in silos on a twenty-minute alert.

As you can clearly see, the consensus of the group as laid out at the beginning was that Chinese missile forces are on “low alert with the warheads separated.”

One of the Russian participants expressed “another view” that was stereotypically paranoid about the capabilities of Chinese strategic forces. When that view was read aloud, there were a lot of puzzled looks around the table. I definitely got in the comment queue.

There was some other really good stuff on the Chinese posture that didn’t make it into the report — including one participant who stated that Chinese warheads are stored kilometers from the silos.

That’s about all I can say given that the meeting occurred under the Chatham House Rule.

I presume readers are familiar with the phenomenon of extreme assessments of foreign nuclear programs by Russian observers. I was very recently at a meeting where one colleague noted dryly, “It is wrong to stereotype entire countries, but if it weren’t wrong, we would say the Russians are paranoid.”

Case in point.

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