Top general warns China's 'staggering expansion' of nuclear arsenal threatens US

Created: 04/06/2022, 06:00

By: Sven Hauberg

Military vehicles with DF-17 missiles during a parade to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in 2019: China is massively rearming.

© VCG/Imago

Just a few weeks ago, China announced a massive increase in its military budget.

The United States is alarmed in a new report.

Munich/Washington – It is not only the armament in North Korea* that worries the US leadership: as the Bloomberg news agency reports, US General Charles Richard warns of China* “breathtaking expansion” of its strategic and nuclear arsenal.

This is a rapidly escalating threat to the US, Richard said in a statement quoted by Bloomberg on Tuesday (April 5).

Richard is the commander of the United States Strategic Command, which is responsible, among other things, for the strategic direction of the US nuclear forces.

In his statement, Richard also refers to a hypersonic missile that China first tested last July* and speaks of a "technological achievement with serious implications for strategic stability".

The rocket flew around 40,000 kilometers in 100 minutes.

It was "the greatest distance and longest flight time of any land attack weapon system by any nation to date," Richard said.

China is investing heavily in hypersonic technology and other types of weapons, Richard continues.

Beijing is also pushing ahead with building about 120 missile silos in western China so that the country could have "rugged" ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US mainland.

China: Massive increase in arms spending planned

Both China and Russia -- two of the greatest threats to global security, according to Richard -- are capable of "unilaterally escalating a conflict to any level of violence, in any arena, globally, with any instrument of national power, and at any time."

US forces could no longer “afford the luxury of assuming that risk is always low, especially during a crisis.”

Hu Xijin, the always combative former editor-in-chief of the nationalist state newspaper

commented on the Bloomberg report on Twitter by saying that the US * had "many more nuclear weapons than China": "How should China view the risks posed by the US ?", he asks.

The Swedish peace research institute SIPRI wrote in an analysis at the beginning of the year that China and the USA are "politically further apart than ever before";

but there are "signs that China's strategies in space, in cyberspace and in the nuclear field are increasingly approaching those of the USA and Russia".

According to the report, China is arming itself massively.

In March, Beijing announced at the session of the National People's Congress that military spending should grow at an above-average rate of 7.1 percent in view of the tensions with Taiwan, the USA and Asian neighbors*.

According to SIPRI, the US spent around 778 billion US dollars on armaments last year, China 252 billion.

According to SIPRI, it is to be feared that China's military policy will trigger a new arms race between Washington and Beijing, which will have a destabilizing effect on the world.

At the same time, however, the many Chinese weapons tests have also created a new level of transparency that allows Beijing's military goals to be better assessed.

"This could make it easier to predict future operations and strategies for early crisis management."