Despite China’s dazzling rocket technology, the country could be on the verge of turning a major technological advance into its nuclear weapon.
That’s the view of US Air Force Gen. William Shelton, the highest-ranking officer in Air Force Space Command, as reported by Reuters, in the same story about China’s journey toward making satellites unable to track its outposts in the far reaches of space.
“We’re a decade away from making it weaponized, but I’m getting awfully close to it,” Shelton told journalists in China at a recent security forum, according to Reuters. “This could be as close to a Sputnik moment for China as anything we’ve seen in the 20th century, and I think we ought to be worried about it.”
Sputnik was a satellite that China tested in October 1957, opening a huge rift in the cold war. That missile changed the game — it established the new race between the United States and the USSR to put a man on the moon.
Speaking to reporters at the conference, Shelton said China appears to be working to overcome the problems that prevented the 1967 Paris Treaty (as reported by Reuters) from outlawing nuclear weapons. He said China was working on developing a nuclear-tipped cruise missile, since cruise missiles have a range of about 700 miles (1,100 km).
Shelton did not suggest that China is developing the full arsenal of such missiles, though some interceptors could be geared toward that, he said. Instead, the prospect of Chinese cruise missiles sounding off on the US appears to be enough to chill U.S. Air Force troops, especially given the Pentagon’s investments in how to shoot down nuclear missiles launched by China or Russia.
As Reuters reports, the Chinese missile industry is constructing some 600 to 700 missiles a year, while it aims to increase output to 1,000 in 2022. That’s an enormous leap from the 250 that were building in 2012.
The Chinese missile industry got a big boost in 2013, when Beijing awarded a contract to state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) to build the next-generation DF-21 “carrier killer.”
Chinese scientists have reported success in boosting the force of an incoming warhead, but that would still only give the force of a handful of weapons. It’s uncertain whether China is developing an integrated payload. It’s easy to go from lightweight ICBMs to ICBMs that house strategic warheads — it’s not as easy to get from there to a nuclear-tipped cruise missile.
There’s a direct correlation between China’s heavy investment in its strategic missile program and the country’s current missile problems. China’s ability to track satellites is currently one of its weapons weaknesses. If it could follow up on its success with the next-generation missile, there’s the possibility that its satellites could be impenetrable to defenses from near and far.
