China is expanding its nuclear force much faster than US officials predicted just a year ago, highlighting a broad and accelerating buildup of military muscle designed to enable Beijing to match or surpass US global power by mid-century, according to a Pentagon report released Wednesday. The number of Chinese nuclear warheads could increase to 700 within six years, the report said, and may top 1,000 by 2030, the AP reports. The report did not say how many weapons China has today, but a year ago the Pentagon said the number was in the “low 200s” and was likely to double by the end of this decade. The United States, by comparison, has 3,750 nuclear weapons and has no plans to increase. As recently as 2003 the US total was about 10,000. The Biden administration is undertaking a comprehensive review of its nuclear policy and has not said how that might be influenced by its China concerns.
The report does not suggest open conflict with China but it fits an emerging US narrative of a People’s Liberation Army, as China calls its military, intent on challenging the United States in all domains of warfare—air, land, sea, space and cyberspace. Against that backdrop, US defense officials have said they are increasingly wary of China’s intentions with regard to the status of Taiwan. “The PLA’s evolving capabilities and concepts continue to strengthen (China’s) ability to ‘fight and win wars’ against a ‘strong enemy’—a likely euphemism for the United States,” the report said, adding that it makes China more capable of coercing Taiwan, the self-ruled island that China claims as its territory. (In other news, a seemingly innocuous recommendation from the Chinese government regarding stockpiling recently sparked speculation of an impending war with Taiwan.)
The Chinese may already have established what is known as a nuclear triad—the combination of land-, sea-, and air-based missiles that the United States and Russia have had for decades—the report said. To its existing land- and sea-based nuclear forces China is adding an air-launched ballistic missile. The Pentagon report was based on information collected through December 2020 and so does not reflect or even mention Gen. Mark Milley’s expression of concern last month about Chinese hypersonic weapon tests last summer that he said came as a troublesome surprise. In remarks shortly before the report's release Wednesday, Milley told the Aspen Security Forum that the hypersonic missile test and other Chinese advances are evidence of what is at stake for the world. “We are witnessing one of the largest shifts in global and geostrategic power that the world has witnessed,” he said. (Much more on the report here.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
