Artillery: Bigger, Faster, Unexpected
January 13, 2022: China has several thousand ballistic missiles, most of them known to be armed only with a variety of conventional (non-nuclear) warheads. It turns out China has a lot more of these than earlier believed. Another revelation is that China considers nuclear warheads much less important than previously believed.
A recent effort to calculate how many nuclear warheads China has concluded that they have not been producing enough plutonium for an expansion of their nuclear warhead inventory and apparently configure their longer range (ICBM and IRBM) missiles with several types of conventional warheads and keep a small number of nuclear warheads in a separate location. This means that even ICBMs are seen as primarily non-nuclear missiles. Recent reports of new missile silos being built inland are apparently not for nuclear missiles, but long-range missiles armed with conventional warheads. This strategy has long been suspected because for decades China openly threatened Taiwan with over a thousand short range ballistic missiles armed with several types of conventional warheads and standing by for a surprise attack that would be able to overwhelm any BMD (Ballistic Missile Defense) capability Taiwan has, even if reinforced by American or Japanese Aegis BMD destroyers. The hundreds of new silos in central China would be more difficult to disable by airstrikes and provide longer range ballistic missiles with conventional warheads to assist attacks on Taiwan, as well as South Korea, Japan and American bases in the Pacific. This use of non-nuclear ballistic missiles is more in line with published Chinese strategy, which emphasizes avoiding the use of nukes at all costs while also using all ballistic missiles as artillery equipped with non-nuclear warheads.
https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htart/articles/20220113.aspx
