In 1962 a spy in the old USSR provided British intelligence with information that the Soviet Union was stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba. This intelligence included photographs of the planned installations. Britain passed this information on to the United States, which used U-2 spy planes to look for evidence of this collaboration. This reconnaissance mission revealed that the missiles were in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy announced the news on October 22, 1962, the same day the new Minuteman ICBMs went on alert.
The Soviets denied any such Cuban stationing. In order to counteract this denial, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, presented photographic evidence of the rocket assembly to the UN Security Council. Kennedy announced an armed embargo on all further supplies to Cuba until the Soviets removed the missiles.
Soviet cargo ships carrying more missiles subsequently returned to the USSR when the existing missiles in Cuba were removed. This enabled the leaders of the Cold War countries to avoid a possible nuclear Armageddon. Kennedy later stressed that the Minuteman missile – with the ability to hit the Soviet homeland from its base in the Midwest – was his “ace in the hole”. It enabled him to end the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Proponents of the Soviet attempt to install missiles in Cuba said that in Turkey, for example, US nuclear missiles could hit the Soviet Union, while Moscow has no comparable ability to hit mainland America.
In short, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev simply “restored the strategic balance”. Little did most people know at the time that Kennedy had secretly agreed in an agreement with Khrushchev to remove the military’s nuclear-armed, medium-range Jupiter ballistic missiles from Turkey. This has often been cited by critics as an admission that the Soviet decision to place missiles in Cuba was understandable.
The new deployment of Minuteman missiles, announced by Kennedy in October, was the leverage the United States needed to end the crisis and restore US deterrence capability against the Soviet Union – even as the Jupiter missiles eventually emerged from Turkey removed.
Fast forward almost sixty years. The nuclear development now facing the United States and its allies is Chinese, not Soviet, in origin. Satellite photos clearly show that China is building 136-145 new ICBM silos in western China.
Is this serious stuff that should get US leaders’ attention? Is it an additional nuclear threat or a simple reasonable Chinese response to US threats?
For example, while U.S. Strategic Command commander Admiral Charles Richard has repeatedly warned Congress about the surprisingly robust Chinese nuclear build-up currently underway, predicting that China would at least double its nuclear capabilities in the current decade, the official’s response Washington’s response to the Chinese nuclear surprise was subdued.
China is building 145 new silos for nuclear-armed long-range ballistic missiles. This roughly corresponds to the construction of one of our ICBM Minuteman wings in North Dakota, Wyoming or Montana. If the United States built such a missile wing today, the cost, based on the original cost of Titan and Minuteman’s silo-based ICBMs, would be $ 17.4 billion.
Now the Chinese have built railroad tracks with railroad cars that can carry ICBMs. They also tunneled into the mountains to hide such missiles. The former high-ranking office of Defense Minister Phillip Karber announced this operation a few years ago and according to his information it is estimated that the Chinese rail tunnel project cost 65 billion US dollars based on the tunnel construction costs that the Chinese government made available to the Israelis Has.
The remarkable thing about the tunnels was the launch platforms outside of them. They are the exact distance a Chinese ICBM can fly to strike air bases in Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota – the three Minuteman ICBs, which barely suggests any nuclear deterrent strategy to destroy the city.
But 136-145 silos make up only a little less than 40 percent of the current ICBM silos used by the U.S. military. So what is the concern? Well that is a good question. The missile that would go into these silos is the Chinese DF-41. Each missile can carry six to ten warheads. In comparison, the Minuteman missile carries only one warhead and is an extremely unattractive target.
That may give the Chinese around 1360-1450 warheads. With ICBMs typically on alert 98-99% of the time, multi-warhead missiles are definitely a first-strike weapon of choice, according to nuclear expert Mark Schneider, a former top official for the defense minister and now a top scientist at the National Institute for public order. Schneider recently wrote a key assessment of the Chinese nuclear forces.
Such alert levels mean that the Chinese Communists may have 50 percent more warheads on alert than the United States is now on a daily alert. The United States has an estimated four hundred Minuteman warheads on four hundred missiles, plus an estimated four to six Ohio-class submarines on patrol at sea, each with twenty D-5 missiles and each missile with four to five warheads. That would give the United States an estimated combined cap of a thousand ICBMs and SLBM warheads on alert. But that sum is still a few hundreds of fewer warheads on alert than just the new Chinese missile force could deploy.
More importantly, the United States as a whole, including non-alarming warheads, is generally deploying an estimated 1,550 warheads daily, including sixty strategic bombers that can carry any number of cruise missiles and gravity bombs with special counting rules under the New START treaty, however still only count as sixty warheads.
With that in mind, if the United States had put a reasonable portion of its strategic atomic bombs on alert, it would have deployed about seventeen hundred to eighteen hundred nuclear warheads. Thus, China would have filled 136-145 new silos with DF-41 ICBMs. This only takes into account the current low estimate of China’s existing nuclear forces. This is serious business, just as the Soviet missile deployment in Cuba was serious. The Soviets wanted to risk dozens of American cities to prevent the United States from defending its allies in NATO and in Europe.
The Soviet goal was to sever the link between US deterrence and the security of Europe, especially in the face of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, to penetrate through the Fulda Gap into western Germany, with conventional forces using NATO forces in defense of Leave Bonn and Berlin far behind.
Because of the conventional disadvantage of the US and NATO, US nuclear deterrence has been key to defending Central Europe and NATO. After all, the long-term goal of the Soviets and now Russia was to split the NATO alliance. The deployment of threatening missiles in Cuba was central to this strategy.
Similarly, as some apologists for China have suggested, Chinese construction is not simply a reasonable Chinese response to US nuclear modernization and the supposedly US-led nuclear “arms race” that is now underway. It also has nothing to do with the previous deployment of US national missile defense in 2003-2004.
The United States has forty-four interceptors. It uses these to counter threats from rogue states such as North Korea and Iran. Apparently, some China experts are claiming that it took China two decades to figure out that US missile defense required a huge expansion of China’s nuclear missile force.
However, critics claim the United States could use sixty-six interceptors instead of forty-four. Even so, such countermeasures make a Chinese first strike against the United States difficult, but not retaliatory abilities. So if China is building new warheads in 1360–1450, it will not be to overcome very limited US missile defense. Instead, it is designed as a first or pre-emptive strike capability to sustain Chinese aggression, such as a military action. This is similar to previous Soviet designs in Western Europe.
The United States is not starting an arms race by modernizing its own nuclear deterrent, and the Chinese are not just catching up or catching up. The current US atomic modernization program was agreed in December 2010. However, no US missile, submarine or bomber will enter the forces by 2029.
On the other hand, the Chinese have been completely modernizing their nuclear forces for decades and are regularly deploying new forces. At the very least, they’ll double their nuclear warheads within the decade, which has prompted Richard to sound the alarm. Unfortunately, the Chinese are cleverly appealing to the crowd that always blames America, and have an alternate explanation of Chinese construction to cover up their intentions. Still, some experts claim that an estimated 90 percent of China’s new silos will be filled with fake dummy missiles.
Then why worry about only twelve real missiles? The People’s Republic of China would have to build around 100-150 missiles for use and testing. But it’s only possible to build three to five missiles a year for three decades. For comparison, the estimated cost for the United States to build that many missiles plus the significant cost of building silos would be $ 21 billion to $ 23 billion. This includes neither warheads nor a nuclear command, control and communication network. So why should the Chinese pay the equivalent of $ 1.9 billion per missile to add just twelve missiles and 120 warheads to their current inventory?
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