U.S. Concerned About Report China is Expanding Missile Silos

Timothy Heath, a senior international and defense researcher for the policy research  group the RAND Corporation, told VOA by email that the silos raise the credibility of China’s nuclear force.

“It shows China intends to expand its inventory of nuclear weapons. This means China is raising the potential risk and cost of escalation in any conflict along China’s periphery,” he said. 

Worst Case Scenario Analysis 
Other researchers warn that the calculations might be worst case scenario assumptions. James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said there are a lot of questions to ask before concluding that China is expanding its nuclear arsenal at such rapid speed.

In an article published in The Washington Post, Acton said that there are still debates regarding how many warheads China’s missiles can carry. He also pointed out there is a possibility that China is mirroring the approach called the “shell game” designed by the United States in the late 1970s for basing some of its missiles.  

During the Cold war, the United States created a plan to build multiple launch shelters for each missile, 23 for one to be exact. The missiles were regularly moved among silos to make it impossible for the Soviet Union to target U.S. land-based ICBMs. The plan was adopted by the Carter administration but was later changed by the Reagan administration. 

Lewis agreed that that is a possibility. “China likely has similar concerns about the survivability of silo-based ICBMs, and may rotate a smaller number of ICBMs among a larger number of operational silos,” he added. 

Acton also pointed out that China still has a relatively small nuclear arsenal compared to the U.S.  According to the Pentagon, China has a warhead stockpile in the low 200s. “For comparison, the United States possesses around 3,800 nuclear warheads, of which around 1,750 are deployed,” Acton wrote. 

The U.S. has repeatedly reached out to China for negotiations on nuclear arms. In May, the U.S. disarmament ambassador, Robert Wood, said at a U.N. conference that China continues to resist discussing nuclear risk reduction bilaterally with the U.S.  China’s envoy, Ji Zhaoyu, responded by saying that Beijing is ready to engage, but only “on the basis of equality and mutual respect.”

Heath, from the Rand Corporation, said that in view of the new developments, the U.S. may seek to press for arms control talks with China, but it’s doubtful China will accept such controls given the small size of its nuclear arsenal. “The U.S. may also need to build more anti-missile defenses,” he said. 

Acton said a quid pro quo might work. “If the United States wants to engage China in arms control, the kind of idea that I think is worth exploring is a quid pro quo, by which the U.S. agrees to limit its missile defenses, for example by agreeing not to develop or deploying missile defenses in space, in return for China agreeing not to produce any more nuclear material with which it could augment its arsenal,” he said in an analysis video posted by Carnegie. 

Lin Yang is a VOA News reporter. This article is published courtesy of the Voice of America (VOA).