In the immediate post-war years, the evidence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was clear for all to see: the most powerful weapons in the world were the new atomic bombs, and only those who possessed them would be in the ‘top league’ of strategic powers. The corollary was that a non-nuclear power would be helpless if threatened by a nuclear power. Faced by this inescapable logic, the efforts to restrict the spread of nuclear weapons has never proved successful.
The history of the British V-bombers is worth studying in some detail, since it shows the complex issues faced by a smaller power in obtaining a viable nuclear force, and the never-ending effort and expense in keeping it operationally viable.*
For over a century the British were the most powerful single power in the world, but at the end of the Second World War they found themselves in a very weak position. The UK was virtually bankrupt, owed vast sums to the United States, and faced a major problem in rebuilding both industry and society at home. To complicate matters, it still had major overseas commitments in continental Europe, as well as responsibilities around the world with its colonial territories. On top of all this was the looming Soviet threat and a continuing desire to remain in the ‘top league’.
It thus became inevitable that the British would develop their own atomic bomb, although their programme was seriously hindered for a while by the refusal of the United States to make atomic information available to the United Kingdom, under the terms of the McMahon Act. This was something which the British found especially galling as they had assisted very substantially in the US Manhattan Project. Nevertheless, after much high-level consideration, the British programme was eventually given Cabinet approval on 8 January 1947,1 and, after brief consideration of ballistic and cruise missiles, it was concluded that the programme must be based upon delivery by long-range manned bombers.
The UK was thus faced with setting up a very large programme. First was the work on the bomb itself, which included the full range of development activity and the construction of a wide range of facilities, including testing establishments, factories to produce the weapons, and storage sites once they had been completed. Second was the delivery system, which had been established as a manned bomber, powered by the then new turbojet engines. Third came the organization in both the government and the UK air force to operate, store, maintain and, in the ultimate, to use the weapons, which required new headquarters, procedures and communications systems.
Despite the complexity and expense, this was all achieved, and the first British atomic device was exploded on the Pacific island of Trimouille on 3 October 1952 and the first atomic bombs were delivered to the air force in November 1953. Meanwhile, technology had progressed from the atomic (A-bomb) to the thermonuclear (H-bomb) weapon, and the British development programme continued, resulting in the first British thermonuclear explosion, a bomb which was dropped from a Valiant bomber over Malden Island in the Pacific on 28 April 1958.
The British programme proceeded through a series of exotically named weapons, starting with Blue Danube, the original British A-bomb, with a 20 kT yield. This was followed by Violet Club, just five of which were produced and which served very briefly in order to give the air force a ‘megaton’ capability at the earliest opportunity. Violet Club was, however, described as a ‘rather delicate’ weapon; it had to be assembled on the bomber base itself by staff from the Atomic Warfare Research Establishment, and once assembled it could be transported only between the assembly point, the storage building and the aircraft. Doubtless all concerned were very relieved when the definitive weapon, Yellow Sun Mk 1, entered service in 1960.
Britain developed its own nuclear weapons to overcome the ban on information from the USA, and it was therefore somewhat contradictory that one of the consequences of that development was that the USA then felt able to release both information and weapons to the UK. Thus, in a programme known as ‘Project E’, the USA supplied a number of nuclear weapons to meet the air force’s requirements until such time as sufficient British ‘megaton weapons’ were available; these US weapons reached the UK air force in October 1958 and remained operational until 1962. The weapons were stored on British air bases, but, by US law, had to protected and maintained by US air-force personnel, and could be transferred to British custody only on direct orders from the US president. The British found that the US custodial arrangements created many complications, especially as the survivability of the V-bombers required them to be deployed rapidly to dispersal airfields in the face of an imminent threat – a factor which the inflexible US custodial and release procedures were not designed to cope with. There was therefore considerable relief when the British-made weapons became operational, enabling the remaining ‘Project E’ weapons for the V-force to be returned to the USA. (US weapons for British aircraft assigned to SACEUR remained until 1968, however.)
The British aimed to field a force of 144 V-bombers in the ‘Medium Bomber Force’, and, in a move which even today causes surprise, they developed four, radically different, designs, of which three actually entered service. During the early years the mainstay of this force was the Vickers Valiant, of which nine squadrons were formed between 1955 and 1957. The Valiant was superseded in Bomber Command by Avro Vulcans and Handley-Page Victors, although the Valiant continued in service as a bomber assigned to SACEUR, and as a strategic reconnaissance and tanker aircraft.
Having worked hard to get the V-force into service, the British then had to work as hard to keep it up to date. The aircraft were designed to meet a requirement for dropping gravity bombs from a high level, out of range of a defender’s anti-aircraft artillery; they were thus optimized for cruising and bombing at 12,000 m. The rapid development of Soviet missile defences, however, made it clear that such high-flying aircraft were extremely vulnerable, and the V-bombers had to be re-roled to a low-level approach, which, because of the resulting increased fuel consumption, had the immediate effect of restricting their radius of action, in turn reducing the number of potential targets. It also increased the loads on the airframes, as was discovered when Valiants were found to be suffering from metal fatigue, which led to the abrupt grounding of the entire fleet in December 1984 and its early retirement a month later.
Meanwhile the front line was maintained by the Vulcans and Victors. The delta-winged Vulcan became operational in March 1957, armed with Blue Danube, with twelve aircraft converted for a short time (1958–9) to carry the ‘interim megaton weapon’ (Violet Club). All Vulcans then carried Yellow Sun or Red Beard nuclear gravity bombs, until, finally, thirty-three were converted to take the Blue Steel stand-off weapon. The Victor, which featured a ‘crescent’ wing, entered service in 1958, and, like Vulcan, carried first Blue Danube and later Yellow Sun or Red Beard (but not Violet Club). Then, too, twenty-three were converted to take Blue Steel.
Blue Steel, which entered service in 1962, represented a different way to solve the problem of countering the enemy air defences. Carrying a 1 MT warhead and flying at Mach 2, it was originally designed for high-level delivery, at which it had a range of 280 km, but when converted to the low-level role this was reduced to 35–42 km.
Several attempts were made to extend the effectiveness of the V-force, the main one being purchase of the US air force’s proposed Skybolt air-launched ballistic missile. This was intended for launch from Vulcans, and would have had a range of 1,760 km if launched from 12,000 m and of 460 km if launched from 300 m. The missiles would have been fitted with British nuclear warheads, but, to the intense embarrassment of the British, the project was abruptly terminated by the USA in December 1962. In the end, the vaunted V-force was replaced by the British navy’s Polaris submarines on 30 June 1969.
When the British air-force nuclear deterrent became operational there was an obvious need for co-ordination with the Americans, so the British held discussions with the US Strategic Air Command (not, significantly, with the Joint Service Targeting Staff). At the initial meetings in 1957 it was discovered that every British target was also covered by the SAC’s list, and, in addition, that both air forces had ‘doubled up’ their intended strikes, to ensure success.2 This was resolved by a combined plan in which the British were allocated 106 targets, including sixty-nine cities of governmental or military significance, seventeen Soviet air-force airfields with nuclear roles, and twenty elements of the Soviet air-defence system. Full tactical co-ordination was achieved by joint planning of routes, timing and ECM tactics.
For the British, however, there was a separate consideration, in that the V-force was an ‘independent deterrent’: its purpose was to be used not only in allied operations with US and NATO forces, but also, as a last resort, in national plans. As a result, once the co-ordinated plan with SAC had been devised, a second national targeting plan was prepared which listed ‘131 Soviet cities whose population exceeded 100,000; from these 131 cities, ninety-eight were chosen which lay within about 3,000 km of the UK and they were graded in order of priority according to population, administrative importance, economic importance and transportation’.3 This British national list became operational in November 1957, and was updated in June 1958.
The British also started to develop an IRBM. Designated Blue Streak, this was a liquid-fuelled ballistic missile, with a range of 2,800 km – the same as that required of the V-bombers – and a 3 MT warhead. Blue Streak was designed to be emplaced in an underground silo, but raised to the surface for fuelling (which took twenty minutes) and launch. The project was started in 1955 but was abruptly cancelled in 1960, just before the (successful) first flight.
Sixty US-owned Thor IRBMs were deployed by the British air force between 1958 and 1963, each armed with a 1 MT warhead. These missiles were treated as part of the V-force, and their targeting was controlled by the Bomber Command Operations Centre, although since the warheads were supplied and controlled by the USA it is to be presumed that their targeting was fully integrated with US plans. Further, like the ‘Project E’ weapons supplied for use by the V-bombers, they were not available for UK national strike plans.
When President John F. Kennedy and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan met in Bermuda in December 1962, one of the subjects discussed was the replacement of the US Skybolt missile, which had just been cancelled by the USA. Prime Minister Macmillan managed to persuade the president to allow the British to participate in the Polaris programme. Since the British navy had traditionally worked very closely with that of USA, the programme went remarkably smoothly, being completed on schedule, with HMS Resolution, the first British SSBN, concluding its first patrol in June 1968. The submarine was created by inserting a sixteen-missile plug into a Valiant-class attack-submarine design, while the Polaris A-3 missiles were designed and built in the USA but had British warheads and re-entry vehicles. The number of missiles was set at sixteen simply in order to ensure maximum commonality with the US Lafayette design.
The British originally planned to build five Resolution-class SSBNs, but, although the Labour government which took power after the 1964 general election decided to continue the programme, it reduced the overall numbers to four boats. With one boat always in refit, one working-up and one in port, the British could only guarantee to have one submarine at sea at a time, with two for some of the time; the average was 1.44.
The general British philosophy of counter-value strikes was carried over from the bomber era to the submarines. The general principles were spelled out by the British admiral Sir Ian Easton in discussing the British purchase of the Trident SLBM system:
The nuclear destruction of a number – say, some dozen – of Soviet cities with a population of over 100,000 would be a traumatic blow to the Soviet Union. Among these cities might be Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Kharkov, Gorky and Stalingrad. The enormous loss of population and industry, the disruption of services critical to the life of the country, and the likely destruction of a proportion of the central bureaucracy of a centrally-organized state, could be expected to markedly weaken the vitality of the nation and the will of its people, and, perhaps, of its armies.4
The original British SLBM was the Polaris A-3, whose British ‘front end’ carried three 200 kT MRVs. These were all aimed around the same target, with a spread between impact points of some 16 km. When the advent of Soviet ABM defences around Moscow using the Galosh missile called the effectiveness of the MRVs into question, the USA offered to supply Poseidon, whose MIRVs were designed to outwit such defences. The British, however, opted for a programme of their own, Project Chevaline, which was based in outline on a US programme called Antelope. In Chevaline, the two warheads and a large number of penetration aids were mounted on a manoeuvrable penetration-aid carrier which deployed the various elements of its payload on separate trajectories, all of which were aimed at the same target, and was designed so that, having dispensed its payload, it then appeared to be and acted like a warhead itself. There were two warheads and three dummy warheads, all of which were enclosed in metallic balloons, with, to confuse the defences even further, a number of empty balloons as well. As the balloons entered the atmosphere they burned away, and the six objects then began a series of planned manoeuvres designed to mislead enemy ABM defences, before all impacting in the same general area. Thus, in effect, Chevaline depended upon disguising the warheads as dummies during the space phase, and disguising dummies as warheads during re-entry. Submarines began patrols with Chevaline in 1982.
In addition to the front end, the main Polaris missile was the subject of several refurbishment programmes. Most noteworthy was the replacement of the engines, which was carried out by the manufacturer in the United States, although the technology was by then so dated that the company had to re-employ retired workers, since the skills required were no longer available.
The Resolution-class submarines were designed to last for twenty years (i.e. 1968–89), but this was subsequently extended to twenty-five years and later to thirty years. In the event this was not achieved, and towards the end of their lives they were showing distinct signs of age, with reports of cracking in the coolant circuits, while Resolution’s final refit lasted five years – two years longer than had been taken to build it in the first place. Fortunately for the UK, these problems occurred at the end of the Cold War. The Polaris force served until past the end of the Cold War, being replaced by a force of four new submarines armed with Trident II (D-4) missiles in the 1990s.
Like those of other countries, the first French atomic weapons were carried by a bomber, in this case the Mirage IVA. This was created by scaling up the very successful Mirage III fighter, adding an extra seat for a navigator/systems officer, and replacing the single engine by two more powerful ones. The first prototype flew in June 1959 and the complete system became operational in 1964, the twenty-four-hour nuclear alert actually starting on 1 October 1964. In its original form, Mirage IVA was a supersonic, high-level bomber carrying the AN 11 gravity bomb, but from 1967 onwards it was converted to the low-level role, using an AN 22 retarded bomb.*
The original deployment consisted of thirty-six front-line aircraft, together with an integral force of Boeing KC-135F tankers which were located at nine widely separated bases, but in 1976 this was changed to thirty-two aircraft at six bases, with the KC-135Fs concentrated rather than dispersed. The number of Mirage IVAs gradually reduced, until the last squadron was disbanded in 1988.
Meanwhile, the Mirage IVP (P = Pénétration) entered service in 1986, at the same time as updated tankers (now designated KC-135FR) were being received. Eighteen Mirage IVAs were reworked to Mirage IVP standard, with improved navigation and electronic equipment to enable them to operate the ASMP (Air–Sol Moyenne Portée), a Mach 2.5 missile with a range of 300 km and a single 300 kT thermonuclear warhead, which was intended for stand-off attacks against heavily defended targets such as airfields and command-and-control centres. The Mirage IVP served through the end of the Cold War, until 1997.
The unrefuelled range of the Mirage IVA/P was insufficient for it to attack targets in the Soviet Union and return to airbases in France, and so the plan was for it to be refuelled over the Baltic or the North Sea, increasing the range from 2,500 km to some 3,800 km. This had two consequences. First, while the ability of the Mirage IVA/P to scramble was excellent, the critical factor was actually how long it took the heavily laden and much slower KC-135F/FR tankers to get to the first refuelling point. Second, the two aircraft were acutely vulnerable while they were refuelling, which limited how closely they could approach Warsaw Pact-dominated airspace. Nevertheless, at least some of the force should have got through to attack targets as far east as Moscow, although how many might have returned was open to question.
In establishing its strategic forces, France determined that they should parallel, in concept if not in size, those of the USA and the Soviet Union by consisting of a triad of land-, sea- and air-based systems. Thus, work began in the 1960s on a Sol–Sol Balistique Stratégique (surface-to-surface ballistic strategic missile – SSBS) system. Originally it was intended to deploy fifty-four missiles, but this was reduced first to twenty-seven and then to the eighteen which were actually deployed. Each missile was located in a hardened silo, with at least 3 km between silos, on the Plateau d’Albion in Haute-Provence in south-east France, which was selected for the nature of its soil, its sparse population and its height (some 1,000 m), which enhanced the missiles’ range. Each nine-missile site had its own command post (each of which could also launch the missiles at the other site). In Condition Blue all missiles could be launched within five minutes of the order being issued, while in Condition Red this was reduced to one minute.
The original missile was the SSBS S2, a two-stage missile with a range of about 3,300 km and carrying a single 120 kT warhead. This was in service from August 1971, but in 1980 it began to be replaced by the SSBS S3D (D = durci: hardened), with a range of 3,500 km and a 1 MT warhead hardened against the effects of EMP. One group of nine S2 missiles was replaced in June 1980, the second in January 1983.
It was very easy for any potential enemy to locate each of France’s eighteen SSBS silos and thus to target them precisely, which made them very vulnerable to a first strike. Indeed, some pragmatic French politicians made a virtue of necessity, postulating that an enemy would be compelled to make its intentions obvious by attacking the SSBS sites, thus giving France justification to launch its other strategic weapons.
The third leg of the French strategic triad was the ballistic-missile submarine, designated Sous-Marin Lance Engins (SNLE) in French service, the first of which became operational in 1972. Unlike the first SSBN designs in the USA and the UK, the French SNLEs were designed as such from the start and were not created by cutting an SSN in two and inserting a missile section. The British, faced with similar problems to the French, built a force of four SSBNs of which one was guaranteed to be on patrol at all times, whereas the French built five boats, of which two were guaranteed to be at sea, and then in 1983 they increased the at-sea figure to three. Availability increased yet further when the sixth SNLE, of an improved design, joined the fleet in 1985.
The first French SLBMs, the two-stage, solid fuel MSBS M1 and M2,* had ranges of 2,500 km and 3,000 km respectively, and carried a single 500 kT warhead with a CEP of approximately 1,000 m. The M1 entered service in 1971 and was in service until 1974, when the M2 took its place. In 1977 the M2 was itself replaced by the M20, which carried a single 1 MT warhead, together with penetration aids and decoys, to a range of 3,000 km. The final Cold War missile was the three-stage M4, which entered service in two variants: M4A, with a range of 4,000 km, and M4B, with a range of 5,000 km. Both carried six MIRVs (six TN 70s on the M4A and six TN 71s on the M4B), and one set of sixteen M4As and three sets of sixteen M4Bs were rotated between five SSBNs.
In March 1989 (i.e. close to the end of the Cold War) the French navy completed its two-hundredth deterrent patrol. Each of these had lasted seventy days, with a twenty-one-day break between patrols for cleaning, minor servicing and crew changeover at the SNLE base on the Île de Longue, off the port of Brest.
The original SNLEs were restricted by the range of the M1 and M2, and thus probably carried out their deterrent patrols in the Norwegian Sea. The increased range of the M20 enabled them to operate from the east Mediterranean and north Atlantic, while the M4 enabled them to operate from most parts of the north Atlantic, including close to the French coast, where they could take advantage of protection, particularly against Soviet ASW forces, by shore-based ASW aircraft.
The general French position towards deterrence was given in 1964 by President De Gaulle, who stated that:
But, once reaching a certain nuclear capability and as far as one’s own direct defence is concerned, the proportion of respective means has no absolute value. In fact, since a man and a country can die but once, deterrence exists as soon as one can mortally wound the potential aggressor and is fully resolved to do so, and he is well convinced of it.5
The declared French policy throughout the Cold War was to target Soviet cities, even when the increasing accuracy of French warheads seemed to make a counter-force strike a possibility. Thus the possibilities with the MSBS M4 were: to concentrate all six MIRVs on one target, to use three each against two targets, to use two each against three targets, or to use one on each of six targets. French officials even argued against increasing the SNLE force to fifteen, as proposed by the Gaullists, because that would have created spare capacity in the anti-city targeting, thus enabling military targets to be engaged and, in effect, ‘diluting’ the French deterrent.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was not a direct participant in the Cold War, but its nuclear forces became an increasingly important factor in both Soviet and US calculations of the strategic balance. As in France and the UK, the government of the PRC which took power in 1949 quickly decided that a nuclear armoury would be essential if the country was to achieve the world status it deserved. The correctness of this decision was supported in Chinese eyes by the various crises involving the PRC and the USA in which the latter, either implicitly or, in some cases, explicitly, threatened the use of nuclear weapons against the PRC.
The Chinese programme appears to have started in 1955, and during the following five years Soviet scientists and military officers played a major role in helping the PRC to establish a nuclear research, development and production infrastructure. This massive help – unprecedented between a nuclear and a non-nuclear power – ceased abruptly with the political rift between the two countries in 1960, which set the Chinese programme back several years. Even so, the first atomic-bomb test took place on 16 October 1964, when a 22 kT device was exploded, followed by a second in May 1965 and a third in May 1966, while in October 1966 a missile was launched carrying a nuclear warhead which successfully detonated on arrival at the Lop Nor test site. The first H-bomb was successfully tested in June 1967, less than three years after the first atomic-bomb test – a considerably shorter gap than has been achieved by any other country.
Despite the Soviet help in the 1950s, the PRC’s rapid ascent to the status of a nuclear power was a truly remarkable achievement. It must be remembered that at the time of the Communist takeover in 1949 China was, in industrial terms, a very backward country, with very little modern infrastructure, and most of the little that did exist had been damaged in either the Second World War or the Civil War. On top of that, there were no established aircraft-construction or shipbuilding industries, no electronics industry, and only a limited weapons industry. Almost everything, therefore, had to be created from nothing.*
The only aircraft with a strategic capability to enter service with the Chinese air force was the Hong 6, a licence-produced version of the Soviet Tupolev Tu-16 Badger. An elderly twin-jet design, it could carry a single nuclear weapon to a range of some 3,000 km. Some 120 were produced and, at least at the end of the Cold War, there were no known plans to produce a successor.
The Soviet Union supplied the PRC with two SS-1 missiles in 1956. These were direct copies of the German A-4, and were followed by fourteen of the improved SS-2 missile between 1957 and 1960. The latter was placed in production as the Dong Feng 1 (DF-1; ‘Dong Feng’ means ‘East Wind’) and carried a high-explosive warhead; it was primitive, but it gave the People’s Liberation Army experience of working with missiles. Meanwhile, a serious domestic research-and-development programme had been set in train, with the intention of producing a family of land-based missiles for use against US targets. The DF-2 was the first and was based on the Soviet SS-3, ‘Shyster’. The missile was road-mobile and was launched from an erector–launcher, although its liquid fuel required a long and hazardous preparation time.
Next came the DF-3, which was much larger, but still road-mobile, although the use of storable liquid propellant resulted in a much reduced preparation time. Deployment peaked at some 120 in the early 1980s but reduced to approximately seventy by the late 1980s. The DF-3 carried a 3 MT thermonuclear warhead and had a range of 2,650 km, enabling it to threaten the US bases then located in the Philippines. A number of DF-3s, reported to be thirty-six, were exported to Saudi Arabia, although it is claimed that these were armed with high-explosive and not nuclear warheads.
The series continued with DF-4, in which a DF-3 first stage was mated to a new second stage; fuel was again storable liquid. With a range of 4,500 km, the DF-4 could attack the US facilities on Guam with a 3 MT warhead, and some fifteen to twenty were deployed. The final missile in this series was the DF-5, which in its DF-5A version delivered a 5 MT warhead over a 13,000 km range.
The PRC has used a wide variety of basing methods for its ICBMs. Both the DF-2 and the DF-3 were road-mobile, but their successor, the DF-4, was originally planned to be silo-based, although once the vulnerability of such a scheme had been appreciated alternative basing methods were sought. A rail-mobile scheme was considered and tested in 1975, but it was finally decided to install part of the DF-4 force in silos and part in caves. The silos are similar those used by the first-generation US ICBMs, with the missiles sitting in the silos atop large elevators which raise them to the surface for fuelling, final preparation and launch (as with the US Atlas missiles in the 1960s). The remaining missiles are mounted on mobile erectors located inside modified caves with blast-proof doors; the missiles would be brought out and erected before launching.
A range of further possibilities was considered for the DF-5s, including rail-mobility and imaginative schemes such as false bridge towers, narrow gorges, mock civilian houses and even barges on the Yangtze river.6 In the end it was decided to base them in hardened underground silos among a large number of dummy silos.
The effectiveness of the Chinese basing policy was endorsed by the US Joint Chiefs-of-Staff, who stated that:
China views its strategic missile force as an effective nuclear deterrent because its deployment strategy of mobility, hardening, and concealment poses targeting problems for any potential aggressor. This strategy enhances the survivability of some portion of the missile force for a significant retaliatory strike.7
Indeed, even after the end of the Cold War it was generally admitted that not even US or Soviet satellites had been able to identify anything approaching all the Chinese missile sites; thus China had achieved what neither the USA nor the USSR had ever been able to do.
Just before their split, the Soviet Union supplied the PRC with the plans and components for a Golf-class, diesel-electric-powered, ballistic-missile submarine, which was completed at Lüda in 1964. This was originally fitted with three vertical launch tubes in the sail, as in the Soviet original, but in 1974 it was modified by removing all three launch tubes and replacing them with two of greater diameter to enable it to test Chinese SLBMs.
The submarine element of the force was the Daqingyu-class SSBN, one of which was launched in 1981 and completed in 1987. This was powered by a single pressurized-water nuclear reactor and was armed with twelve Ju Lang 1 SLBMs.
The Ju Lang 1 (‘Ju Lang’ means ‘Great Wave’), like the US navy’s Polaris, used solid fuel, rather than the liquid fuel of the land-based ICBMs. The first launch was from a submerged barge in April 1982, followed by a launch from the Golf-class trials submarine on 12 October 1982 and from a Daqingyu-class SSBN in 1988. The missile carried a single 250 kT warhead to a range of 1,700 km, and by the end of the Cold War it served in one twelve-missile SSBN.
The PRC’s initial intention was to target US military facilities in the Far East and, eventually, the USA itself. Thus the DF-2 was intended for US facilities in Japan, the DF-3 for US bases at Subic Bay and Clark Field in the Philippines, the DF-4 for the airbase on Guam island, and the DF-5 for Hawaii and the west coast of the continental USA. With the deterioration of the relationship with the USSR and, in particular, the border clashes in 1969, the PRC completely reoriented its strategic force to target the Soviet Union – the only example of such a move during the entire Cold War. Thus the DF-2 and the DF-3 were retargeted against Soviet cities in the Far East and Central Asia, while the DF-4 brought Moscow and the large cities and military–industrial facilities in the Urals and Siberia within range. The DF-5, however, could reach any target in the Soviet Union and western Europe.
One of the unusual aspects of the Chinese nuclear forces is that they have been fielded in remarkably small numbers: the maximum numbers of land-based missiles to be deployed, for example, were 120 DF-3s, twenty DF-4s and four DF-5s. The capacity undoubtedly existed to produce and deploy many more, but the Chinese leadership appears to have taken the view that its strategic needs would be adequately met by possessing a nuclear force capable of delivering an effective retaliatory strike if attacked by nuclear weapons – i.e. an assured and effective second-strike capability against population and military–industrial centres.
* Specifications of British nuclear bombs and bombers are given in Appendix 13.
* Specifications of British, Chinese and French SSBNs are given in Appendix 14.
* Specifications of French nuclear weapons are given in Appendix 15.
* A ‘retarded’ bomb deploys a small braking parachute to delay its fall, thus enabling the aircraft to fly clear before the nuclear weapon explodes.
* MSBS = Mer–Sol Balistique Stratégique (sea-to-land ballistic strategic missile).
* Specifications of Chinese ballistic-missile submarines are given in Appendix 14 and of Chinese missiles in Appendix 16.