With China rapidly accumulating nuclear equipment as part of its strategy to achieve global dominance, the Pentagon has announced that the communist nation has surpassed the US in the number of ICBM launchers.
The US nuclear force was designed more than a decade ago to primarily deter Russia, not Russia and China at the same time. While the US is modernizing its nuclear capabilities, it is not doing so at the pace necessary to deter this growing threat.
The Pentagon’s announcement means that China has built enough missile silos or mobile launch pads to surpass the 450 missile silos the US has in the American Midwest.
The Pentagon also clarified that China has not yet equipped all missile launchers with long-range missiles, but now that the launchers are ready, that would be the most logical next step.
As the former commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Harry Harris, testified before Congress later this week, China’s “dream of national rejuvenation by 2049 … will be bolstered by its nuclear capability.”
In addition to this massive expansion of its intercontinental ballistic missile force, China is also producing nuclear warheads; already completed a nuclear triad of land, air and sea nuclear capabilities with the launch of a strategic bomber; and is improving its arsenal of regional nuclear missiles that can reach as far as the American island of Guam, in Micronesia.
China has also tested technologies previously unknown to Russian and American arsenals, such as a fractional orbital bombing system, which can circle the globe before launching a nuclear missile on a hypersonic trajectory.
For these reasons, the former commander of the US Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, declared: “As we assess our deterrence against China, we see that our ship is slowly sinking.”
Considering the speed of China’s nuclear buildup, Admiral Richard is probably right. Images published in the summer of 2021 revealed for the first time that China was building more than 300 new missile launchers. Given that China already had around 300 missile launchers in its arsenal and must be well along with this new build, it must have already surpassed the 450 launchers in the US.
If China has made such rapid advances in such a short time, the US must prepare for even greater expansion in the coming years. The Pentagon had recently predicted that China would be able to deploy the same number of warheads as the United States by 2035. It wouldn’t be a surprise if China beats that prediction.
This news, in conjunction with the already known information of the Chinese spy balloon that recently hovered over US nuclear missile bases, should signal China’s intention to achieve nuclear parity with the US – or even to have nuclear superiority.
America needs to wake up to this growing reality for which it is woefully unprepared. The current US nuclear force structure – given the number and types of US nuclear weapons – was designed more than a decade ago based on the need to primarily deter Russia, as China was believed to hold possibly only a few hundred. of nuclear weapons. But times have changed.
The US is already modernizing its nuclear capabilities, but only to replace what we already have on a one-to-one basis. And it’s moving at a slow pace.
As China continues its nuclear expansion, the US needs a nuclear force capable of convincing China that the costs of using nuclear weapons far outweigh any benefits. At this time, it is unlikely that the US can do this with a nuclear force not large enough to take on both Russian and Chinese nuclear forces at the same time.
The US has been making plans for a long time to strengthen its nuclear forces in order to reinforce the deterrence of the growing Chinese threat. These efforts should include increasing the overall size of the US nuclear arsenal and creating additional capabilities such as the nuclear-armed cruise missile. The United States also needs to improve its ability to make changes to its nuclear forces at the same rate as the threat continues to evolve.
Strengthening US forces will likely require a long-term commitment, which means sufficient budgetary requests from current and future administrations and consistent funding from Congress. Given that nuclear weapons pose the only existential threat to the US and that nuclear deterrence remains our top national security priority, the US must be prepared to meet this challenge.
Patty-Jane Geller is an analyst with a focus on nuclear deterrence and missile defense at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense.
Copyright 2023 The Daily Signal. Published with permission. Original in English.
#China #surpasses #number #nuclear #missile #launchers