Question: How many nuclear warheads does China have stockpiled beneath its “Underground Great Wall”?
- 30
- 300
- 3,000
The truly scary part here is that it is difficult to know the answer to this question. However, if the rumors and conjectures about China's vaunted “Underground Great Wall” are even remotely true, China will likely win this nuclear warhead contest hands down—if not today, then certainly in the coming decades. As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns: “Today, China is the only one of five original nuclear weapons states that is increasing its nuclear arsenal.”1
To understand the breadth, depth, and significance of China's emerging nuclear-warhead threat, it is useful to return to a little Missiles 101. In a nutshell, there are three main classes of missiles by range and reach for the world to worry about.
First and most forebodingly, there are the strategic missiles. These are the long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles or “ICBMs” that form the backbone of a country's nuclear strike and deterrence capabilities. With a range of between three thousand and ten thousand miles,2 the most sophisticated ICBMs are capable of reaching any point on the planet from any other point—say, from Szechuan Province to Los Angeles, or from Minot, North Dakota, to Beijing.
In contrast, tactical missiles have a range of usually less than two hundred miles and are designed primarily for short-range battlefield applications. As their big advantages, tactical missiles can provide deeper strikes than conventional artillery while being very difficult to defend against. Tactical missiles are also relatively cheap and can deliver anything from conventional high-explosive warheads or nuclear warheads to chemical or biological payloads—the undear-departed Saddam Hussein's “Scuds” are a prime example.
Finally, theater missiles fill in the distance gap between strategic and tactical weapons. They range from around two hundred miles to more than two thousand miles, and they are designed to hit targets literally “in theater”—meaning within the region of a country like China. For example, China would use its theater missiles to strike targets in Guam, India, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, or Vietnam.
Besides the distinction of missiles by distance, it is also useful to think about how such missiles can be launched. In the old days of the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States set their nuclear-tipped ICBMs into fixed-point silos “hardened” with tons of cement and steel. However, as technology has improved, fixed silos have become much easier to pinpoint from space with the Global Positioning System while silo-seeking missiles have become so accurate they can literally blow the doors off a fixed silo. As a result, countries like Russia and China—the United States still lags far behind—have moved to a “whack-a-mole” system of mobile launch sites that makes it far more difficult for an enemy to take out their nuclear arsenals.
Finally, there is an important distinction between how the rockets that propel the missiles are fueled. In the old days, this was strictly a liquid-fuel game. The problem with liquid-fueled rockets, however, is that they take a relatively long time to prepare for launch, and during that time, they are highly vulnerable to being detected and destroyed on the ground. Solid-fuel rockets, on the other hand, solve this problem as they can be launched much faster than liquid-fueled rockets—within seconds or mere minutes—and they are also much safer and easier to store.
Given this Missiles 101 checklist, let's get back to our question of how China stacks up when it comes to its nuclear-warhead capabilities. But of course this question also gets us back to the problem of a lack of transparency in China's nuclear-weapons program. Such a lack of transparency is in sharp contrast to both the United States and Russia, which have worked hard to use the arms-control treaty process to reduce the prospects of nuclear war.
That process began in earnest in 1991 when the United States and Russia's predecessor, the Soviet Union, signed the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty known as “START.” This treaty limited each country's nuclear arsenal to six thousand warheads deliverable by no more than a total of 1,600 ICBMs and bombers. By 2001, this treaty had “resulted in the removal of about 80 percent of all strategic nuclear weapons then in existence”3—by any measure, an astonishing success.
After the first START agreement expired in 2009, the United States and Russia entered into a New START agreement in 2011 that further reduced the nuclear arsenals of both countries. This even more stringent new treaty set aggregate limits on the numbers of deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles to seven hundred, slashed the number of nuclear warheads on deployed ICBMs to 1,550, and halved the combined number of launchers and heavy bombers allowed to eight hundred.4
While the START process has gone a long way toward reducing the nuclear stockpiles of the two former cold warriors, China has steadfastly refused to meaningfully participate in any form of arms reduction. Instead, China has used the occasion—and cover—of these treaties to develop its own missile and warhead capabilities across a broad spectrum without any apparent constraint. As former Pentagon advisor and Georgetown University lecturer Phillip Karber notes:
The Chinese today have the largest range of nuclear-capable missiles of any country in the world. And what I mean by that is they can go from very short range to intercontinental. We and the Russians, under the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty abolished an entire class of medium and theater missiles…. So the Chinese are unique, they have the entire spectrum of these missiles.5
At the center of China's development of long-range precision-strike nuclear missiles is the Second Artillery Corps, with its vaunted Underground Great Wall. The Second Artillery Corps itself begins with its own bit of deception and misdirection. It was established as the “second” rather than “first” corps by Premier Zhou Enlai back in 1966 as a means of concealing its importance to the outside world; its true mission was only revealed publicly in 1984. That mission is to run China's complete missile arsenal—both ballistic and cruise as well as conventional and nuclear.
The centerpiece of the Second Artillery Corps’ missile strategy is indeed its Underground Great Wall. Construction on what essentially is a maze of underground tunnels wide and high enough to accommodate large trucks commenced back in the late 1960s as China first began to develop its nuclear weapons program. Today, this network features over three thousand miles of truck and rail routes crisscrossing the country, and these routes are fully capable of transporting mobile missiles and launchers at speeds of up to sixty miles an hour. As Professor Karber, America's foremost Underground Great Wall expert, notes: “China's trucks and trains can get to a spot and have their missiles ready to fire in about fifteen minutes. They feel pretty safe with that because by the time our satellites might detect that activity, they have already launched.”6
Nor is the existence of this Underground Great Wall a matter of speculation. Rather, this stunning facility was revealed with great fanfare on Chinese national television as far back as 2006.
What is a matter of speculation is the number of nuclear warheads China may be hiding within this vast and opaque web of nuclear-strike capabilities. At the conservative end of the spectrum, the Pentagon has consistently estimated that China has no more than 240 to 400 nuclear warheads.7 However, Karber issued a report in 2013 raising the possibility that China may have as many as three thousand nuclear warheads stored within its Underground Great Wall. If true, China's total number of warheads would be roughly equal to the combined American and Russian arsenals allowed under the new START agreement.8
While Karber's study was roundly criticized in some quarters for exaggeration—one representative from the Union of Concerned Scientists called it “ridiculous” and “lazy”9—such criticism misses the broader point that China's nuclear-warhead development is proceeding apace in total secrecy and without limits. Such criticism also ignores the fact that China is perfecting a land-based delivery system that is virtually impregnable. Moreover, the incredible mobility of China's strike force in moving nuclear weapons at high speeds underground to different launch sites adds further to the “whack-a-mole” difficulty of neutralizing such a strike force. In comparison, America's land-based nuclear weapons are almost exclusively housed in fixed silos with locations widely publicized on internet sites like Google.
There is one other important consideration for our detective story when it comes to China's Underground Great Wall: Because no one knows just how many missiles China has hidden, this lack of transparency has become a potent tool of coercive Chinese power. Indeed, when news of the existence of China's missile-tunnels program broke, many countries throughout Asia expressed both fear and alarm.
At the same time, because no one outside of China really does know how many nuclear missiles and warheads actually exist, China can dismiss any claims of large stockpiles as greatly exaggerated. In this way, China can have it both ways—stockpile what it may want but plausibly deny any large stockpiles.