U.S. Exaggerates Chinese Nuclear Threat, Report Says

The United States has exaggerated the nuclear threat posed by China to justify its own weapons acquisition programs, two nongovernmental nuclear analysis groups charged in a report issued yesterday (see GSN, May 24).

“The Pentagon has been sounding the alarm about China’s nuclear intentions for a long time, but our analysis shows that they are overstating the threat,” report co-author Robert Norris, a nuclear analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a release yesterday.

“Now that the Soviet Union is gone, the military needs a new threat to justify buying new missiles, destroyers, submarines and fighter planes.  So they’re hyping China.”

The report specifically criticizes U.S. portrayals of China’s long-range missile and submarine capabilities.  U.S. assessments have warned that China has a growing number of missiles that could reach the United States and that Chinese submarines are an expanding threat.

In fact, the report says, Chinese submarines rarely go to sea and the one submarine capable of carrying nuclear missiles has never been fully operational.  Furthermore, Chinese strategic missile forces are growing far more slowly than asserted by U.S. officials, the report says (Greg Webb, Global Security Newswire, Dec. 1).

The head of bipartisan commission on China, however, supported official U.S. assessments, Reuters reported today.

The Pentagon has produced a “realistic picture of what China is doing in the nuclear arena,” said Larry Wortzel, head of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (see GSN, Nov. 17).

China has been developing new generations of mobile missiles, advanced re-entry vehicles and “countermeasures to make its nuclear force a more serious threat,” he told Reuters (Reuters/New York Times, Dec. 1).

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