Jul 4th 2021 CHINA’S NUCLEAR arsenal is piddling by American or Russian standards. The country has scarcely 200 warheads, reckons America’s Department of Defence, and perhaps 100 or so inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Until last week it had only 16 known silos for latest-generation ICBMs. So eyebrows were raised when satellite imagery revealed 120 new ones being built in the desert of Gansu province, in western China. The silos, near the city of Yumen, were identified by researchers from the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, an American think-tank, whose…
A silo-building spree raises questions about China’s nukes
