Twenty years of estimating China’s nuclear forces: the “about 100 warheads” of 2004, the 3,000-warhead myth, noisy submarines and the missile silo fields found in 2021.
Today, I am working on the dissertation chapter about Chinese nuclear deployments. Recent reports by the Council on Foreign Relations, National Resources Defense Council and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (subscription) all describe the People’s Republic of China as…
Behold, the second installment of the series on China’s SSBNs. This took a while, mainly because I wanted to reread Tom Stefanick’s Strategic Antisubmarine Warfare and Naval Strategy. It’s a classic. Anyway, the bottom line is that I doubt China’s…
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…
Mark Stokes has a really cool paper out on China’s system for handling warheads (China’s Nuclear Warhead Storage and Handling System): The Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission (CMC) maintains strict control over China’s operational nuclear warheads through a centralized…
Well, what to say about Phillip Karber’s forthcoming report that suggests China might have more than 3,000 nuclear weapons stashed away in all those tunnels that the Second Artillery has been building over the past few decades? Well, for one…
As many of you know, the latest annual China Military Power Report produced by the U.S. Department of Defense for Congress came out last week. The reports contains quite a few interesting tidbits, but I spotted one thing that really…
A quick post before the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S. In my professional life, I am especially grateful for high frequency satellite imagery. This week Planet Lab’s SkySat sensor allowed us to make two very interesting observations about China’s…
This article was co-authored with Decker Eveleth. Decker Eveleth is a junior at Reed College studying International Comparative Policy Studies. He sometimes moonlights as the disembodied head of an Iranian weapons designer. China may be modernizing some very old ICBM…
By Joshua H. Pollack and Scott LaFoy P.W. Singer and Ma Xiu have an important story in PopSci with a nifty find about China’s DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), which carries either nuclear or conventional payloads. It goes some way…
Decker Eveleth and Jeffrey Lewis’s team at CNS have found 119 silos for ICBMs out in the deserts of China. That’s the largest expansion of PRC silos in history, by far, but it isn’t totally clear what is going on,…
Jeffrey Lewis and Decker Eveleth Well, look what Decker found. Satellite images taken by Planet and analyzed by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (CNS/MIIS) indicate that China is significantly…
Matt Korda and Hans Kristensen with the Federation of American Scientists have tracked down what appears to be a second field of missile silos near Hami, Xinjiang. Aaron, Jeffrey, and Scott gather up to discuss the rapidly increasing number of…
