Someone – Goku? germy? – wanted me to see that China has built 120 new missile silos in their western desert.
[Disclosure: Jeffrey Lewis has been a friend for years, and we have consulted each other on many things. Our political views are similar, but he has a punchier way of expressing them.]There’s a lot that can be said about this discovery and the current state of relations with China, but I don’t have time right now, so a few highlights only.
That China is increasing its nuclear capabilities is not surprising. Both Russia and the United States, which have several thousand nuclear weapons each, are modernizing their nuclear forces. China has 200 to 300 nuclear weapons.
China has stated that they regard their nuclear force primarily as a deterrent. These new silos add to that deterrent. Because China doesn’t have enough plutonium to make weapons to fill all those silos, speculation is that China will move missiles from one silo to another to provide a changing target.
A summer intern, Decker Eveleth, found the silo field by looking at overhead photos. This is a specialty of Lewis’s and his students, who have refined the technique. They prepared a media strategy to announce the find, because they wanted to shape how it was received. There is currently a fair bit of agitating against China by people who seem to be itching for a war. Finding a new capability could stoke their agitating.
They announced the discovery to Joby Warrick at the Washington Post, who wrote a story about it. James Acton, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote an analysis, as did Lewis. Wonkier parts can be found here and in a podcast.
The Washington Post Editoral Board called for arms control talks with China, in response to the find. China does not want arms talks until the US and Russia take their numbers much further down, or perhaps until their numbers are higher.
Open source intelligence continues to be played down by government professionals, but this find illustrates that it has the potential to affect policy. Did government analysts find this field but not say anything about it? Does its revelation by a non-governmental organization with its own spin make a difference in policy and public perception?
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner
germy
Not me.
I didn’t know nuthin’ about this.
Cermet
China does (or least did) not consider the U.S. a significant enemy (unlike Russia.) As such, its missile force was small both because of this fact, its limited plutonium production and cost. But of course, the U.S. military industrial complex (aka the wealthy who have all the stocks) are creating a hostile environment to threaten China and create a cold war – how better to reap profits?
Poe Larity
Looks like the old Dense Pack Strategery.
All they need is some Peacekeepers. Lot of canals in that area, why not make a bargeable weapon?
Japanese should have just sold all the Fukushima plutonium to China to recoup the cleanup costs.
debbie
@Cermet:
Not that I feel slighted, but why? Is this recent and does it have anything to do with TFG?
Poe Larity
Um, wait. Isnt there a windfarm there? Look to the south of town. Sure they’re not foundations for new wind turbines?
Major Major Major Major
The pushback on this from tankies and useful idiots has been depressing and predictable. Lewis has been quote tweeting them, im sure you’ve seen it.
Cermet
@debbie: Because of WWII and they recall that we fought with them and helped drive the Japanese out of China. Also, during the Opium wars, a big part of the Chinese reparation monies that they paid the US, we didn’t keep it but instead used it to set up a major university system in China (unlike the Brit’s and French.) This too they haven’t forgotten.
catclub
@Poe Larity: It even has a label for Yumen Gansu Windfarm. The silo locations have all had something put on the image to stand out.
Of course, maybe dual use? Windfarm and silo farm?
RobertDSC-Mac Mini
So if a stack of MIRVs were to target this field, what is the point of grouping them so close?
Poe Larity
Ah, cant access wonkier links but it would be weird to the cover construction of turbine pylons.
Poe Larity
@RobertDSC-Mac Mini: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_Pack
VeniceRiley
So we are to assume that those things that look like dots added to a photo are not only not just dots, but do not look like any known wind farm base or configuration?
This is why I rely on expertise of yours.
Major Major Major Major
The Gansu wind farm has thousands of turbines. Why would they space out an addition like this? (The map is maybe 100km wide.) And that’s before we get into whether one of the premier OSINT people knows what he’s doing.
Another Scott
Thanks for this.
Lewis’s FP story says there were rumors for a couple of months. I doubt very much that the eyes-in-the-sky people didn’t know about this, or at least have the data, but there can always be surprises.
Arms control is so much more sensible than pie-in-the-sky countermeasures. Of course, more research is always sensible to prevent an actual breakthrough by the other side, but we’re a long, long way (still) from having a good-enough defense for these things.
It’s really, really easy to rain death and destruction down from the skies. It’s really, really hard for outsiders to impose their will on another country. What purpose do these things serve? We’ve argued for decades that nuclear weapons are only a deterrent and nobody can win a nuclear war. We need to take the next step and do away with them – even if nobody else does. The arguments for keeping them don’t hold up. Do we really think that our military couldn’t take action against a state threatening, say, to blow up NYC? Nobody has secret invulnerable bases anymore – conventional US bombers and missiles can reach anywhere on the planet…
It’s spendy, also too. ACA.org (from March 2020):
That would pay for a lot of good things for the USA (and the world).
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
pat
So what are those dots anyway? Looks kid of weird that they would show up like that in a photo.
kid = kind
Major Major Major Major
@pat: they’re added so you can easily see where the silos are.
sorry if I’m stepping on your toes, Cheryl, I’ll stop
pat
@Major Major Major Major:
That’s what I thought. Wonder what it looked like so they could be identified.
Another Scott
A February FAS story about expansion of the missile training area is interesting. A different site, but not terribly distant from this site.
Cheers,
Scott.
bjacques
@Poe Larity: It’s a useful stratagem if you don’t have a lot of missiles.
35 missiles and a dense pack to my name…
DENSE PACK!
I’ll see myself out…
WhatsMyNym
Take a look at 40.362667, 96.393320 what is that? Looks like a tower or the base of something.
ETA: shows on bing and google.
Ksmiami
@Cermet: they see us as competitors but not necessarily enemies… A small albeit significant difference.
Cheryl Rofer
Folks – Many of your takes are wrong. And your questions would be answered if you would look at a few of the links.
Gonna except M^4 and Another Scott for reading the top post and (gasp!) reading beyond it.
Anoniminous
Dense Pack was thunk-up’ed under little Ronnie RayGuns as a way to hide exactly where MX missiles were lurking at any one time. Like most of little Ronnie’s senile brainstorms* it was deemed completely stupid, totally unneeded, and never implemented.
* another one was hauling World War II battleships out of mothballs, alas that one was implemented
NotMax
Meanwhile, Xi is not shy when it comes to rattling some sabers.
Ninedragonspot
@Cermet: “China does not consider the US to be a significant enemy”
Taiwan says hello.
boatboy_srq
Wouldn’t this same set include the Putinistas that played puppetmaster to Lord Dampnut and the Death Breathers? It fits well with their sinophobia.
Robert Sneddon
@RobertDSC-Mac Mini:
Siloes are hardened to an extent that a warhead would have to land within a couple of hundred metres or less of the silo to cripple it with a high degree of confidence. These siloes are ca. 3km apart so each silo would need at least one warhead allocated to it in a surprise attack to have a high expectation of preventing a retaliatory launch. A significant fraction of the US first-strike fleet would need to be allocated to target this single missile field in an attempt to cripple perhaps a dozen DF-41 ICBMs in-place.
AFAIK the US siloed Minuteman missiles carry a single warhead each and the only MIRVs left in the toybox on the US side are the retaliatory second-strike submarine-based missiles with two warheads per Trident D5 missile. I may be wrong on this.
RobertDSC-Mac Mini
@Robert Sneddon:
Interesting. I figured MIRVs would be something that the US would have kept for utility purposes.
Thank you.
ian
@Cheryl Rofer: In fairness, your links are behind paywalls. The armscontrolwonk and Global times were the only two sources I could find to discuss this that weren’t paywalled. Perhaps you would care to share what takes you think are wrong in the thread, and more importantly why?
Cheryl Rofer
@ian: I have other things to do today. A number of the commenters seem not even to have read the top post. So have fun in this open thread
ETA: I’ll jump back in if something interests me.
Anoniminous
@RobertDSC-Mac Mini:
MIRV warheads were removed from Minutemen III some time ago.
Cermet
@Ninedragonspot: Taiwan is part of China (of course the native population is of a different mind but are controlled by the displaced Chinese (put into dictatorial power partly with our help) but that can of worms is another issue. ) Frankly, I don’t really care about them; if they are so important then let them build a vast military to defend themselves.
And again, that does not make China our enemy even in Chinese eyes – only our rightwing nut jobs want American kids to die on that hill … .
RobertDSC-Mac Mini
@Anoniminous:
I did some cursory looking up and you’re right.
My memory of US nuclear capability has been rendered obsolete, lol.
gary hein
@Poe Larity: Not really. Gives us pause about what is really going on.
Another Scott
@ian: The FP link is easily available in a Private Browsing (or whatever your browser of choice calls it) window.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Robert Sneddon
@RobertDSC-Mac Mini: Going from memory, after the START and START II agreements to limit launch platforms and warheads the US decided to keep the 250 or so Minuteman IIIs in silo fields and reduce the missile bus to carry a single warhead. The Soviets kept their comparable missiles with MIRV capability but there were only something like forty or fifty siloed missiles in their fleet. The Russians are in the process of modernising those missiles but there may be even fewer of them in total after the program is complete. The MIRV capability is being retained along with supposed hypersonic-manoeuvering capability, stealth and other sci-fi goodness added to the warheads, intended to improve the chances of them getting through anti-missile defences and avoiding radar detection.
Another Scott
@WhatsMyNym: Are you sure those are the right coordinates? Google shows me a gravel road, and a picture of a guy on the side of the road taking pictures of some bush with pink flowers. Bing doesn’t show me much of anything.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ninedragonspot
@Cermet: “Frankly, I don’t care about them” is perhaps the only accurate part of your response.
The potential for military conflict between the US and China has increased because of Xi’s increasingly aggressive approach to Taiwan and because the events in Hong Kong have demonstrated that all promises of “One country, two systems’ are hollow. Taiwan is a country of 23.5 million people, approximately the same size as Australia or Scandinavia. It’s one of the better-run democracies in East Asia. It is a critical source for chip manufacture. It has one of the world’s larger economies (depending on how you measure it).
Thus, it is by no means a given that the US would simply walk away from Taiwan in the event of an invasion. Indeed, Biden has been strengthening the Indo-pacific alliance to increase military deterrence against an invasion. Just in the past week or two, Japan announced that the defense of Taiwan was an important component of its own national defense – a public stance that was unthinkable a year ago.
Western parts of Taiwan were administered by the Qing Empire,who then ceded the territory to Japan. Taiwan’s status after Japanese withdrawal was never finally adjudicated. Taiwan has never, ever been part of the PRC.
Taiwanese growing resistance to annexation by China is rooted in the separateness of their lived experience for 125 years & their attachment to their open and democratic system (an achievement that was hard-earned, following 40+ years of KMT (Guomindang 國民黨) White Terror. The waishengren influence (what you call “displaced Chinese”) hasn’t been much in evidence for decades. Indeed, in recent decades the KMT has distinguished itself by wanting closer ties with China, not fewer. And the simplistic ethnonationalism that claims that “they’re all Chinese” is met with an increasingly firm sense of Taiwanese-ness, an ideology that originated during the Japanese colonial administration, and which is rooted in the area’s particular history and mix of cultures.
James E Powell
@Another Scott:
I get a bunch of people in field of dry grass, all wearing some kind of protective gear.
For dust or chemicals?
ian
@Another Scott:
Thanks, I appreciate it.
Another Scott
@James E Powell: Looks dusty.
I notice a red flag next to a dirt path. Maybe they’re orienteering/geocaching?
Cheers,
Scott.
WhatsMyNym
@Another Scott: Satellite photos. That 360° photo seems to be at a different location, it shows up when I put the location of supposed control base in too.
Another Scott
@WhatsMyNym: Might be this.
(Found via looking at “THE 5 BEST Things to Do in Guazhou County – 2021” link that showed up on searching for the county.)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
James E Powell
@Another Scott:
If you spin it around, you can see two people sitting by the side of the road. Neither one with the face covering, one of them looking right into the camera. Are they taking a break? If this is opening scene of a movie, what do you think the movie is about?
Another Scott
@James E Powell: “In a world…” [/Don LaFontaine]
Cheers,
Scott.
Cermet
@Ninedragonspot: Aware of most of that and still, so what? Like it is our job to be the police-person of the world? Taiwan needs to defend itself. We are neither responsible for them nor does that make sense to defend it; however, I am not saying we declare that we are abandoning Taiwan but we certainly can’t or should fight for it under any circumstances.
WhatsMyNym
@Another Scott: Good try, but not even close to location. The ruins are about 15 miles SW of what I’m looking at – here.
Ninedragonspot
@Cermet: Which is fine – that’s your particular position. But the US is reinforcing its posture in the Indo-pacific precisely because of the threat to Taiwan and aggression in the South China Sea. It is not merely the result of wishlisting by the military-industrial complex or the fever dreams of the far right.
Ohio Mom
It was Goku who wrote Cheryl.
As a layperson, that photograph is hard to interpret as far as size since there are no landmarks, just sand. I wish there was a legend showing the length of a mile, for scale. I guess all I really need to know though is it’s big.
This is almost off-topic it’s so irrelevant but in my mind’s ear I’m hearing Tom Lehr sing,”First we got the bomb and that was good because we love peace and motherhood.” As I recall, China was included even back then in the list of nuclear bomb owners.
WhatsMyNym
see #51
Another Scott
@Ohio Mom: Looking at Google Maps, it’s pretty easy to find the fan-shaped region. From the scale there, it looks like the “silos” are on the order of 1-2 miles apart.
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
Rocks
Cheryl – those silos in the north are in an alluvial fan (as the aerial photo makes clear – nothing else looks like that). Plus this site is in western China, which is arid to desert – kind of like our American southwest – which is where alluvial fans are created. The way they form is that 99 percent of the time they just sit there and bake in the sun. The other one percent, you get a monsoonal downpour uphill (south in this case), which results in a torrential run off across and down the surface of the fan. Unless you’ve been in one or more of thse it’s almost impossible to imagine the violence of the volume of water and the speed at which it races down the fan. I’ve seen boulders several feet on a side bouncing along in these floods. Don’t even start me on the Port-A-John. The point is – if I had a bunch of nuclear missle silos, I wouldn’t put them where they would be the recipients of this insane phenomenon. The Chinese government is welcome to reimburse me handsomely for this timely advice.
Bendal
The image at the coordinates in question look like a concrete base of some kind of tower, not a silo to me. The standard Google maps show nothing in the area but a lot of 4WD tracks, as if someone was surveying the area to expand the windfarm further to the west.
Given that the area appears to be a floodplain of various rivers flowing together, ISTM that ground penetrating nuclear warheads would damage a large number of silos packed that close from each other.
Bill Arnold
Is this in public text anywhere? (I haven’t read the FP piece; access (uhm) methods not working today.)
What they did worked remarkably well; I’m impressed.
( Dr. Jeffrey Lewis@ArmsControlWonk twitter is fun this week. )
WhatsMyNym
@Bendal: The coordinates I gave are not referenced in the articles. The google and bing satellite photos seem to be too old to show any of the construction which is being referenced in the OP.
bjacques
@Ninedragonspot: 30-odd years ago I thought it was stupid and cheap to throw over Taiwan in favor of the PRC, after all Taiwan went through to become a democracy. I haven’t seen anything to change my opinion since, especially now that democracies have become something of an endangered species. And of course doing the decent thing would have been nice. Taiwan is not Mainland China. It’s been over 70 years.
And, in view of what you said about the KMT, “Unleash Chiang Kai Shek” is ironic now.
Cheryl Rofer
@Bill Arnold: That is my interpretation. When three articles like that hit within a few hours of each other, it’s hard to come up with another interpretation, although YMMV.
If you’re watching Jeffrey’s Twitter, you’ll see it if he says it, but I doubt he will.
Ninedragonspot
@bjacques: yeah, the KMT is many different types of ridiculous nowadays. Their multiple, shifting positions on vaccination have been ludicrous. But despite the 40 years of White Terror, they remain a viable party because they still have a lot of resources at their disposal, have drawn some additional support from non-Hoklo communities in Taiwan (Hakka, Aboriginal), and can count on some assistance from the CCP.
WhatsMyNym
@Bill Arnold: I was able to read FP with the Brave browser on Android and Windows. Don’t tell them.
topclimber
@Ninedragonspot: Thank you for the background about Taiwan.
Perhaps Taiwan could be independent if it were demilitarized, and certainly clear of nuclear weapons.
China is at heart a defensive state, which is why I don’t get worked up about XI threatening those who bully his country. They went through that with Western powers who divvied them up economically and to some extent territorially; from Japanese who were off the chart brutal occupiers during WWII; and from US militarists who wanted Douglas MacArthur to push past the the Yalu River during the Korean War and restore that estimable Confucian scholar and corrupt mofo Chiang Kai-Shek.
Trash-talking bullies is not the same as threatening your neighbors because Lebensraum.
Ninedragonspot
@topclimber: A demilitarized Taiwan would instantly be annexed by China. There would be an enormous loss of life and freedom among its 23.5 million inhabitants.
Geminid
@bjacques: When the junior Senator from Vermont said something about defending Taiwan last year, I researched the topic. I read that the U.S. posture on this question is “strategic ambiguity”- we don’t say we will defend Taiwan, and we don’t say we won’t.
I guess this will not be put to the test anytime soon. But it looks like there will be plenty of U.S. naval activity in the South China Sea over the next few years.
China could eventually try to take Taiwan. Some speculate they might use the extensive passenger air traffic between the countries to bring in “little green men” as Russia did in Crimea. If the Taiwanese decide to fight it could be a very destructive war, and they might not succeed. The waters around Taiwan are well within range of mainland based antiship missiles, and antiaircraft missiles can cover Taiwanese airspace. I’m not sure we could break a blockade of Taiwan even if the Japanese helped us.
Ninedragonspot
@Geminid: Absent a KMT-led capitulation to China, I don’t see how there could possibly be a little-green-men scenario in Taiwan, particularly by passenger air. Taiwan controls its border. Even before the pandemic struck, China had sharply limited tourism to Taiwan in an attempt to damage the standing of Tsai Ing-Wen and the DPP.
A blockade would be regarded as an act of war.
Geminid
@Ninedragonspot: Yes, a blockade would be an act of war. I’m not sure it could be broken, though.
Bill Arnold
@WhatsMyNym:
Thanks; worked for me as well. Usually my firefox (with an extensive loadout of plugins) is better. (At one point I had a trial subscription of Foreign Policy. )
Ohio Mom
Another Scott:
Thanks! That helps. I thought it was bigbit it’s much bigger.
Ninedragonspot
@Geminid:
I’ve got no relevant experience to say whether a blockade could be broken or not, but the international response to a blockade would surely extend beyond purely military action.
Geminid
@Ninedragonspot: Well, I probably have less experience or knowledge than you as to blockades. I just know that China keeps building up its long range antiship missile capabilities, and that modern antiaircraft missiles have ranges of 300 miles.
I certainly want to see Taiwan survive as a free and independent nation. I just am not certain that they or the world could stop determined Chinese aggression 10 or 20 years from now. But I think the U.S. is right to maintain a presence in the sea around Taiwan despite Chinese claims that the South China Sea are Chinese territorial waters. And if the Japanese, with their strong navy, will play a role, so much the better. The Chinese can be blockaded too, although I think they would prepare for this if they ever did move on Taiwan
topclimber
@Ninedragonspot: Not necessarily. I would say about as necessarily as that Taiwan will be devastated in any US-China war.
How to avoid both? Credible international guarantees in the first case, a forever alliance with the US in the second. Both are bluffs.
Throw in a home defense force that specializes in cyber, guerilla and all forms of asymmetrical warfare and the price for invasion goes up.
I look forward to picking this up again in a thread that still has a heartbeat.