Military watchers in recent years have made much of the rapid modernization of China’s military, focusing primarily on the introduction of new platforms, such as the J-20 stealth fighter and the refurbished Varyag aircraft carrier, or advances in missile technology, such as the Dong Feng-21D “carrier killer.” To a large extent, this is also what the US Department of Defense’s latest report on the Chinese military released last week zeroed in on.
However, since 1995, tens of thousands of soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have been working on a project that, to date, has attracted surprisingly little attention. That this is the case befuddles the mind, as this endeavor, first revealed in a 2008 CCTV documentary and confirmed by the PLA’s China Defense Daily in December 2009, has the potential to alter the strategic balance in the Pacific. Stunningly, the new Pentagon report only makes one brief mention of that development.
The project in question is a 5,000km tunnel, dubbed the “underground Great Wall,” which the Second Artillery has been digging in the mountainous regions of Hebei Province. The Second Artillery is in charge of China’s ballistic missile arsenal, including its strategic nuclear deterrent, though the latter falls under direct command of the Central Military Commission.
According to reports, the tunnel is being built to store China’s nuclear arsenal.
Officially, China has a “no first use” nuclear policy, meaning that its nuclear deterrent is contingent on its ability to sustain and survive a first strike. Given its reported depth of hundreds of meters underground, the tunnel would play a large role in ensuring China’s nuclear arsenal weathers an initial attack, even one that includes several nuclear weapons, so that it can counterattack.
Beyond survivability, the tunnel would make it far more difficult for US and allied imagery intelligence satellites to detect and locate China’s nuclear launchers. According to a recent study by the Union of Concerned Scientists on China’s nuclear capabilities, the Second Artillery has an arsenal consisting of about 155 nuclear warheads ready to be deployed on six types of land-based missiles (other estimates put the number of warheads at about 400).
Worryingly, it is not known whether China has installed what are known as Permissive Action Links devices that “lock” nuclear warheads until the proper codes have been provided, usually by the president, to ensure civilian control over nuclear weapons.
Once everything is stored underground, and given that China tends to decouple warheads from the missiles, it will be next to impossible to quantify China’s entire nuclear arsenal. Not only would 5,000km of storage allow for a greatly expanded arsenal, but transport capabilities within the tunnel could allow for the launch of nuclear weapons from a number of locations along the tunnel.
A speaker at the Asian Strategic Studies Conference in Newport, Rhode Island, earlier this month said that, based on bits of information he had pieced together, estimates of China’s nuclear inventory could be missing the mark by a wide margin (as with everything else concerning the PLA, the nuclear forces are shrouded in secrecy and ambiguity, forcing governments and analysts alike to make guesstimates). Any substantial increase in its arsenal would mean that Beijing’s limited deterrent is — or could become — far greater than what we have come to expect.
If this were to materialize, the entire strategic balance in Asia would be shaken and would inevitably force the US, the sole security guarantor in the region, to reassess how it calculates the risks and costs of intervention, such as during a crisis in the Taiwan Strait.
J. Michael Cole is deputy news editor at the Taipei Times.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017