nuclear-news

Comparison between USA and China’s management of their nuclear arsenals

Sino-American rivalry: Energy consumption, nuclear energy and deadly nukes  Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East. He tweets at @theerimtanangle July 10, 2014

“………Just the other day, the Associated Press (AP) released a timely report on America’s still-existing nuclear arsenal, in which Robert Burns insightfully explained that the “nuclear missiles hidden in plain view across the prairies of northwest North Dakota reveal one reason why trouble keeps finding the nuclear Air Force. The ‘Big Sticks’, as some call the 60-foot-tall Minuteman 3 missiles, are just plain old. The Air Force asserts with pride that the missile system, more than 40 years old and designed during the Cold War to counter the now-defunct Soviet Union, is safe and secure. None has ever been used in combat or launched accidentally. But it also admits to fraying at the edges: time-worn command posts, corroded launch silos, failing support equipment and an emergency-response helicopter fleet so antiquated that a replacement was deemed ‘critical’ years ago. The Minuteman is no ordinary weapon. The business end of the missile can deliver mass destruction across the globe as quickly as you could have a pizza delivered to your doorstep.”Even as the Minuteman has been updated over the years and remains ready for launch on short notice, the items that support it have grown old, Burns also writes.

In 2012, Michelle Spencer, Aadina Ludin and Heather Nelson compiled a troubling report for the USAF Counterproliferation Center. The report’s title illustrates just how dangerous these remnants from the Cold War on US soil today are: The Unauthorized Movement of Nuclear Weapons and Mistaken Shipment of Classified Missile Components. The authors present a narrative of frolic and detour that is unsettling to say the least: “[o]n August 31, 2007, a US Air Force B-52 plane with the call sign ―Doom 99‖ took off from Minot Air Force Base (AFB), North Dakota, inadvertently loaded with six Advanced Cruise Missiles loaded with nuclear warheads and flew to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana. After landing, Doom 99‖ sat on the tarmac at Barksdale unguarded for nine hours before the nuclear weapons were discovered… While the Air Force was reeling from the investigations of the unauthorized movement of nuclear weapons, it was revealed that Taiwan had received classified forward sections of the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile rather than the helicopter batteries it had ordered from the US, bringing to light a second nuclear-related incident”. Particularly, the phrase “inadvertently loaded with six Advanced Cruise Missiles loaded with nuclear warheads” should make everyone’s blood boil.

In contrast, the up-and-coming superpower of the 21st century China does not seem to dispose of such a wide array of technical and/or other difficulties besetting its nuclear arsenal. In 2011, the Washington Post ran a story indicating that the Chinese (or rather the CCP) constructed “a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal”, called the“Underground Great Wall”. An associate professor of strategy at the US Naval War College, James Holmes, then, writes that in “March 2008, China’s state-run CCTV network broke the news about a 5,000 kilometer network of hardened tunnels built to house the Chinese Second Artillery Corps’s increasingly modern force of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. Tunneling evidently commenced in 1995. Located in, or rather under, mountainous districts of Hebei Province, in northern China, the facility is reportedly hundreds of meters deep”

In the end, the US as the only nation to have ever exploded a nuclear device during wartime appears to be experiencing difficulties managing its now-aging stockpile of nuclear warheads. While China, on the other hand, seems to have devised a novel way of controlling its own nuclear arsenal. In a way, these two different stories of nuclear arms’ storage could be understood as a metaphor for the waning and the rising of fortunes … Does the dragon ascend to ever-loftier heights as the eagle is slowly touching down? Will the ongoing yet somewhat unseen rivalry between Obama’s America and Xi Jinping’s China determine the course of humanity in the coming year or will the large-scale food shortages expected by 2050 combined with the ill-effects of climate change make the continuation of such competitions utterly futile and pointless? http://rt.com/op-edge/171824-sino-american-rivalry-energy/

July 14, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | China, USA, weapons and war