New Report Finds Pentagon Exaggerates China's Nuclear Capability

[Jcrowley]

New Report Finds Pentagon Exaggerates China's Nuclear Capability
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Last modified : November 30, 2006 2:01 PM
Pentagon Exaggerates China’s Nuclear Capability to Justify Buying
New Generation of U.S. Weapons, Report Finds

Urgent Steps Needed to Defuse Potential for U.S.-China Nuclear Face-Off

The U.S. military, intelligence agencies, and conservative think tanks and news organizations are exaggerating China’s nuclear weapons capability to justify developing a new generation of nuclear and conventional weapons, according to a report issued today by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

Likewise, the report found that the Chinese have been citing U.S. weapons upgrades as a rationale for modernizing theirs, locking the two nations in a dangerous action-and-reaction competition reminiscent of the Cold War.

“The Pentagon has been sounding the alarm about China’s nuclear intentions for a long time, but our analysis shows that they are overstating the threat,” said Robert S. Norris, an NRDC nuclear analyst and co-author of the report. “Now that the Soviet Union is gone, the military needs a new threat to justify buying new missiles, destroyers, submarines and fighter planes. So they’re hyping China.”

Based on unclassified and declassified U.S. government documents as well as commercial satellite images of Chinese installations, the 250-page report, “Chinese Nuclear Forces and U.S. Nuclear War Planning,” provides a detailed overview of China’s nuclear forces and its plans to upgrade them. It also describes two nuclear strike scenarios that calculate the casualties that each side would suffer.

(For the report, go to http://www.nukestrat.com/china/chinareport.htm. For high-resolution Google Earth satellite images of dozens of nuclear weapons-related and military sites in China, as well as nuclear strike simulations from the report, go to http://www.nukestrat.com/china/FAS-NRDC2006.kmz.)

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