Paul,
Unlikely.
It takes trillions of dollars to build those weapons. I am not talking about R&D, i am just talking aout hardware costs. If you add up all Chinese military spending in the last decade and if they apply all of it for nukes, it'd be only a few hundred missles, at the most.
It may be likely that the 20 missles estimation is wrong, i'd agree with it, it can easily be 100 missles, but i don't think it'd be a thousand.
Actually, no. Cruise missiles are cheap. And the warheads are not much more...once a sufficiently large nuclear infrastructure is in place. And the Chinese have that.
Be that as it may, even the leftist anti-war sites admit the Chinese likely have 400 nuclear warheads. I think they are off by a factor of ten. Here is one of them, the Natural Defense Resource Council, with a surprisingly open admission:
"The Chinese have been very effective in keeping secret the details about the size and composition of their nuclear stockpile. Thus there remains uncertainty about the size of the nuclear bomber force, the number of ballistic missiles deployed, and whether or not China has "tactical" nuclear weapons. The above table above represents our best estimate. China is believed to maintain an arsenal of about 400 warheads of two basic categories, including some 250 "strategic" weapons structured in a "triad" of land-based missiles, bombers, and SLBMs. We have listed about 150 "tactical" weapons: low yield bombs for tactical bombardment, artillery shells, atomic demolition munitions, and possibly short- range missiles."