After Pentagon’s claim that Beijing’s narrowing the gap with the US by expanding its nuclear arsenal much quicker than expected, Chinese Foreign Ministry has slammed US Department of Defence’s report on China’s nuclear arsenal as “full of prejudice.”
Blasting the US as the “world’s largest source of nuclear threat,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin claimed on Thursday that DoD’s report ignores facts pertaining to China’s military just like previous similar reports.
He also stressed that no country will be threatened by China’s nuclear weapons as long as it uses no nuclear weapons against China.
The report was also blasted by the state-run Chinese tabloid Global Times, which has stressed that since China’s nuclear arsenal is one of the top state secrets, any description of its nuclear power building by Washington is speculative and inaccurate despite the figures tossed out by the Pentagon.
The Global Times called on Beijing to provide solid support for the national security by ensuring the credibility of China’s nuclear deterrence and to dynamically maintain the nuclear power needed for ensuring that security.
The US Department of Defence released its annual report on military and security developments, in which Pentagon specifically argued that Beijing has expanded its nuclear arsenal much quicker than anticipated, predicting that it will own at least 1,000 nuclear warheads by the end of the decade.
The United States view China as a strategic rival on the world stage.
The annual report titled Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China states that the PRC likely intends to amass at least 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, hence exceeding the pace and the size the US projected in the 2020 China Military Power report.
According to the report, China is investing and expanding the number of its nuclear delivery platforms on land, sea and is constructing the necessary infrastructure to support this major expansion of its nuclear forces.
It also underscored that Beijing is building a viable “nuclear triad” by developing a nuclear capable air-launched ballistic missile (ALBM) and improving its ground and sea-based nuclear capabilities.
The report asserted, among other things, that the increased pace of its nuclear expansion will allow Beijing to possess up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads by 2027 and 1,000 warheads by 2030, 2.5 times more than estimated a year ago.
Stressing that the weapons are purely defensive, China is currently maintaining only a small collection of between 200-350 nuclear warheads sufficient to deter an attack and has, at the same time, implemented a no-first-use policy.
Be the first to comment