The worst-case scenario, of course, is that every silo will contain the largest missile it can hold, fitted with the maximum number of nuclear warheads. Some analysts believe China is constructing something of a shell game designed to make a smaller number of missiles harder for their adversaries to target.

But a plausible best-case scenario is that some or many of the silos will remain empty. Something as benign as wind farms is far-fetched. Share on Twitterįor their part, Chinese commentators emphatically reject the notion that any of these sites are missile fields, instead proposing questionable alternatives, such as that they are misidentified wind farms. The nuclear weapons the United States already has should be adequate to counter the threat posed by new Chinese missiles even under very pessimistic assumptions. A third site in Inner Mongolia might become a similar silo field, but it is smaller and at a much earlier stage of construction. Because the structures in these fields closely resemble a known group of completed silos, analysts are confident that these are new missile fields. The first two, in western China, probably will have 110 to 120 silos each when completed. The silo fields first came to public attention in June through the efforts of open-source intelligence analysts who spotted them in images from commercial satellites. Many basic questions remain unanswered, including how many will be built and how many weapons they'll contain. There's a lot we don't even know about the Chinese silos. officials eventually decide they have to target the Chinese silos, nonnuclear weapons and sensors would provide a more credible deterrent than building additional nuclear weapons would. nuclear arsenal was designed to guarantee deterrence even in the case of surprises such as this one. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall III echoed that concern, saying, “If they continue down the path that they seem to be on-to substantially increase their ICBM force-they will have a de facto first-strike capability.” He added, “I'm not sure they fully appreciate the risks that they're adding to the entire global nuclear equation.”īut there's little reason for the United States to worry much about whatever the Chinese military is building in these silos-and plenty of alternatives to building more nuclear weapons for dealing with it.

Charles Richard, who oversees America's nuclear arsenal as commander of U.S. “We are witnessing a strategic breakout by China,” said Adm. military officials have also sounded the alarm. Matthew Kroenig, a Defense Department adviser during the Trump administration, suggested in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that “the Pentagon should study whether it can meet its deterrence requirements with existing stockpile numbers” in case “an increase…is necessary.” The discovery of what appear to be hundreds of new missile silos under construction in China has inspired arguments that imply the United States needs more nuclear weapons.

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