Free Republic

Fact: The Chinese have plans to at least double their arsenal by the end of the decade' China's military seems like it is growing in every direction possible. For example, Chinese shipbuilders are adding new aircraft carriers, amphibs and destroyers at an alarming pace. Chinese armored vehicle engineers are fast-adding new infantry carriers and mobile artillery platforms. Chinese weapons developers are adding large numbers of new drones and attack robots. But the largest and potentially most alarming element of all of this, according to many senior U.S. leaders, is the staggering pace at which China is adding nuclear weapons. “A...

Ex-Russian strategic commander says new Chinese missiles threaten 1987 U.S.-Russia arms treaty. A former commander of Russia’s nuclear forces warned the Obama administration this week that China’s short-range nuclear missiles are undermining the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the United States and Russia. Retired Col. Gen. Viktor Yesin, a former commander of Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces, also said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon that U.S. and Western arms specialists have dramatically underestimated China’s nuclear arsenal. Beijing’s warhead arsenal, he said, likely is between 1,600 to 1,800 nuclear warheads and bombs. Yesin met with Pentagon, military,...

An unconventional project by US university students has concluded that China's nuclear arsenal could be many times larger than current estimates, drawing the attention of Pentagon analysts. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Georgetown University students under the instruction of a former Pentagon official have assembled the largest body of public knowledge yet about a vast network of secret tunnels dug by China's secretive Second Artillery Corps, responsible for nuclear warheads. The 363-page study has not yet been published, but has already sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top US defence officials, including the Air Force vice...

The Chinese have called it their “Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal. For the past three years, a small band of obsessively dedicated students at Georgetown University has called it something else: homework. Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data. The result of their effort? The largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by...

The Chinese have called it their “Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal. For the past three years, a small band of obsessively dedicated students at Georgetown University has called it something else: homework. Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.