“New Pentagon report claims China now has over 500 operational nuclear warheads”
I wonder if the NeverTrumpers will claim that China’s nukes are ‘rusty’ and therefore don’t work, as they claim about Russian nukes.
Last year Russia claimed to have 12,000 tanks. Turns out only about 2,500-4,000 of them were operational or serviceable.
Nuclear weapons are far more expensive and much more expensive to maintain. Given the state of the Red Army in general it is fair to conclude that the Russians very likely have skipped maintenance on most of their nuclear weapons.
China, on the other hand probably has more nuclear weapons than the Pentagon says they do and they’re probably maintained much better than the Russian weapons.
The problem in China is that if there are any major problems with missiles or warheads it’s unlikely that any career officer in the PLA is going to sacrifice himself in order to give the bad news to his superiors or the Politburo. Who wants to be denounced, arrested, and imprisoned for reporting an unpopular truth?
This is the problem with autocracies is the leadership is consistently fed information they wish to hear as opposed to accurate information.
The converse applies in the West where it seems that our defense and intelligence agencies consistently underestimate our abilities and they consistently overestimate the capabilities of our adversaries.
I’ll plead guilty of the latter point because last year I figured Ukraine was doomed and the Russians would be on the Polish border in no more than ten days. Because our media had all sorts of things to say about Russia’s capability and hardly anything at all to say about the abilities of the Ukrainian forces.
In short, whatever the actual state of the Chinese nukes are I’d fathom that China’s leadership has just as much factual information on the subject as you and I do.