The Chinese Communist Party is reportedly building more than 100 silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in various areas in its desert proving true to rumors on it raised last year.
Breitbart said China is constructing hundreds of new silos in its Gansu province desert that were unexpectedly discovered by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies via satellite feed following rumors on plans for it.
The James Martin Center identified several sites in China's northwestern desert that included 119 under construction near Yuman City and another dozen under construction in the neighboring city, which is two miles away.
Breitbart highlighted that the sites are "nearly identical" to each other and to China's nuclear missle facilities. Breitbart described that the silos are bug enough to hold China's new DF-41 ICBM that is said to have multiple warheads and capable of reaching the United States.
China and Russia, as per Breitbart, have just met on Monday and extended their two decade alliance and celebrated their growing closeness. During the said meeting held between China's Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin, the countries agreed they will not "target strategic nuclear missiles against each other."
In an article for Foreign Policy, James Martin Center's Jeffrey Lewis narrated how China's new silos were discovered.
He said after reading a "rumor" from the September 2020 U.S. Defense Department report, he hired the scholar Decker Eveleth to map out the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force order of battle. He said China's People's Liberation Army is in charge of the nuclear armed missiles China uses on land.
What Eveleth sent him afterwards totally surprised him and made him believe that China is "dramatically expanding its arsenal of nuclear-armed" ICBMs.
Lewis, in the op-ed, said "Decker found a large number of structures that were identical to the ones housing missile silos at Jilantai."
"But while Jilantai has only 16 of each structure-which I lovingly call a Bouncy House of Death because it appears to be an inflatable structure-the site near Yumen has nearly 120. (Specifically, 119 by Decker's last count. We're counting again.) These silos are probably for China's newest nuclear-armed missile, the DF-41."
The DF-41, or Dong Feng-41, is a long-range ICBM capable of hitting United States territory from China, the Center for Strategic & International Studies revealed.
"Given that China has a force of only about 100 ICBMs, seeing another 100 or so silos under construction was jaw-dropping. The site itself is enormous-more than 700 square miles," Lewis added.
"There are the silos. There are also underground bunkers being built that may function as launch centers, with trenches carrying cables to 10 different silo launchers," he stressed. "There are roads and a small military base. The scale of construction is startling, and China broke ground on the site only a few months ago, in February."
Lewis also highlighted that this discovery is "alarming" because the United States is in the middle of an arms race with China and Russia. He said the solution to this is arms control that China and Russia has no intention of doing unless the United States takes the lead. He said the choice now is left to the government to be made.
Foreign Policy said these signify "it's time to go back to arms talks." On the other hand, the Washington Post (WaPo) reported that the silos may just be a "decoy" since China has been known to do this in the past.
"The acquisition of more than 100 new missile silos, if completed, would represent a historic shift for China, a country that is believed to possess a relatively modest stockpile of between 250 and 350 nuclear weapons," WaPo said.
"The actual number of new missiles intended for those silos is unknown but could be much smaller. China has deployed decoy silos in the past," the media outlet added.
Breitbart explained that the silos could actually contain nothing or some could be loaded with missiles such that in a time of war their adversaries would find it difficult which silos to target.
It's worth noting that the report comes after a Chinese propagandist said China should prepare for a "nuclear showdown" following revived interest in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where COVID-19 is believed to have been engineered and leaked from.
