China Increased Nuclear Weapons From 400 to 500 Warheads
Written by Chriss W. Street
China having never ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty or the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, is responding to internal and external economic crises by dramatically expanding its nuclear arsenal from 400 to 500 warheads.
As seen in the chart below, China’s economic miracle since 1990 was funded by a world record increase in foreign direct investment from less than 1 percent of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) to 6.2 percent of GDP by 1993. China foreign direct investment over the next thirty years averaged about 3 percent of GDP. That $3 trillion of foreign investments was then leveraged with bank loans to about $15 trillion dollars.
China’s official annual GDP is $18 trillion, but the real number is closer to $14 trillion. Now that the economic boom hasexpired, foreign direct investment in China has shriveled to below where it started as a percent of GDP. As foreign investors have left, Chinese banks are now at risk for about $12 trillion of potentially insolvent loans.
China pretends to have a communist welfare system. But non-Han Chinese such minority peasants such as Tibetans, Mongols, and Uyghurs are “temporary workers” in coastal big city export factories that are not eligible for any unemployment insurance. That means huge numbers of broke military-age are bused home with no opportunities.
According to Geopolitical Futures, “Communist Party of China officials at a recent annual plenary session decided that minority provinces in western China populated by a variety of ethnic minority groups – would have to be turned into a “strategic barrier” against geopolitical threats.”
The province will become home this fall to police vocational trainings and military drills. The decision echoes a statement made last week by Yin Bai, head of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, about the need to prevent and resist “color revolutions” – a veiled reference to supposed Western-backed insurgencies.”
Desperate to not have an internal revolutionary environment as export factories close, China announced plans to bolster domestic demand with over 5 trillion yuan ($704.23 billion) or 5 percent of GDP in business subsidies and consumer incentives.
With little hope of increasing domestic demand, about half of China’s stimulus money is being aggressively spent on China’soffensive military capabilities. In addition to rapidly expanding its nuclear triad, China in recent years has been developing road-mobile ICBMs and improving its sea and air-based deterrent.
The People’s Liberation Navy over the last five years has grown from 340 ships to 370 ships, including a third aircraft carrier. Capabilities set to be unveiled in the next few years include a new ballistic missile submarine, a strategic bomber, a long-range refueling tanker and possibly a conventionally armed intercontinental ballistic missile.
In addition to the to radically increasing strategic nuclear weapons, The People’s Liberation Navy Southern Theater Command recently held “high-intensity” combat drills featuring the Jinggang Shan, China’s most advanced amphibious landing warfare ship.
China also launched the CCG-5901, the world’s biggest coast guard vessel, along with a number of other new and advanced coast guard ships, in exercises advertised in Chinese media as being designed to break a military coalition blockade.
The 2023 China Military Power Report by the U.S. Department of Defense also indicated that China has installed a laser directed-energy weapon on one of its amphibious combat vessels. The United States introduced its first ship-borne laser weapon system on a ship similar to China’s Type-071 in late 2019.
China claims that it will achieve military parity with the United States by 2027. But that assumes China does not internally implode as the internal and external crises deepen.