William Schneider Jr, who served as deputy secretary of state during the Reagan administration and is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote to the Wall Street Journal on September 7, claiming that Beijing is increasing its nuclear warheads at an alarming rate, as quoted by Chinese media.
Citing a report by the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), he said that the PLA’s DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile can carry 10 sub-warheads, while the new submarine-launched ballistic missile can carry perhaps 6-10 sub-warheads, and with the addition of nuclear warheads carried by strategic bombing warplanes, the number of Chinese nuclear warheads deployed is now not 350, but more than 3,000.
Schneider claims that on the basis of land-based silo missiles alone, China’s nuclear warhead count could already exceed 1,500, and that with the new US-Russian Strategic Nuclear Weapons Reduction Treaty, China’s nuclear forces will exceed the total number of US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons by 2030.
“The so-called ‘evidence’ that allowed William Schneider Jr. to start this conversation remains the same commercial satellite maps that have been repeatedly hyped by the US media and think tanks and are indistinguishable from the real thing,” said the Global Times.
William Schneider Jr. begins his article by saying that recently released satellite images show that China is rapidly building nearly 300 fortified “underground silos” in its western desert, and that it is surprisingly building a third base of similar size near the city of Ordos.
The Global Times cited an earlier Russia Today report on US media speculation about China’s expanding nuclear arsenal, which quoted leading British academic Tom Fowdy as saying that “the US media’s claims are unverifiable and that the US is making such speculation because it wants to threaten China and expand its influence in the Asia-Pacific region”.