China Ballistic Missiles and Nuclear Arms Thread

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AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
Remember how during the Kosovo War NATO said they destroyed 90% of Serb armor when it was actually more the other way around at 10% because of decoys? And decoys are cheap.
 

taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
There are currently 3 long range early warning radar sites that I am aware of. North, East and South. The fact of China having them is nothing new. The last time I read about it, it was about the south site, it was 2016. The first one was in the North (east) earlier than 2016.
 

taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
Yes, sigh. I meant which post or user put those pictures up? I.e.: was it some random on PDF or CDF or someone more legitimate.
But anyhow, that is more or less a moot question now given it seems like the pictures are not deemed as very legitimate





To be honest it is more the quality of the photo which is the issue. If the quality was better I could translate it.

But even though it's blurry, I think I can say that the JL-2 "3-6" part is definitely not referring to kilotons, but rather it says “3-6 个 something 弹头," i.e.: 3-6 something warheads. The "something" word is hard to make out but looks like it can be "核" which, in this sentence means 3-6 nuclear warheads.
The word "个" means "number of" in this case.


But it's all a bit superfluous anyway, because the pictures are almost definitely not credible.
The quality of the photo is not perfect, but is good enough to make out 90% of the infor. And what you and others have translated so far are accurate.

Your Chinese reading is better than you may think. Or you were just being modest?;) The character in question is 核. It can be more than 50% sure by its shape alone. When put into the context of SLBM and ICBM, the probability reaches to 100%.

Regarding "credibility" of the pictures. They are presentation packages presented by active duty officers, see the "google searching" suggestions below. These packages are like school books which are state sanctioned (by MoD and MoEducation). So the slides are as credible as MoD is willing to tell. But whether the figures are true is another question, I think even the MoD may "lie" some times to not reveal critical information.

The presentation does not look un-legit, as there have been some similar PLA presentations over the last year that have been strangely open, but for such numbers about the strategic nuclear deterrence to be unveiled is unprecedented and makes me wonder if it's legit...

It is not some, but all over the country in the past years. If you google 国防教育宣讲, you can find all provinces and all civil institutions and organizations. It is a state organized "campaign". So it is not strange either. It is activities of "National Defense Education Day" which falls on September 16th every year.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
, an article from MoD, you can see many provinces are doing it.
 

Richard Santos

Captain
Registered Member
Remember how during the Kosovo War NATO said they destroyed 90% of Serb armor when it was actually more the other way around at 10% because of decoys? And decoys are cheap.

The NATO conventional anti-armor doctrine was configured around blunting a Warsaw Pact armor assault underway. So the emphasis is on identifying deployed and mobile tanks and AFV and attacking them while they are maneuvering. Depots and armor parks in the second line were suppose to be attacked with tactical nuclear weapons.

As shown in the first gulf war, the NATO conventional anti-armor doctrine were highly effective when used as they were intended to.

It is best not to generalize the implications of a few cherry picked scenarios. It is more important to identify exactly what the enemy doctrine is, before assessing whether the scenario being examined plays to the strength or the weakness of the enemy doctrine and equipment.
 

AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
The NATO conventional anti-armor doctrine was configured around blunting a Warsaw Pact armor assault underway. So the emphasis is on identifying deployed and mobile tanks and AFV and attacking them while they are maneuvering. Depots and armor parks in the second line were suppose to be attacked with tactical nuclear weapons.

As shown in the first gulf war, the NATO conventional anti-armor doctrine were highly effective when used as they were intended to.

It is best not to generalize the implications of a few cherry picked scenarios. It is more important to identify exactly what the enemy doctrine is, before assessing whether the scenario being examined plays to the strength or the weakness of the enemy doctrine and equipment.


China is bigger than Iraq and China is not desert terrain. According to NATO pilots they suspected some targets were decoys but they had to hit them anyway just in case hence why NATO proclaimed destroying 90% of Serb armor. Having to hit possible decoys is the same as not knowing they were decoys. The lasting image was when the war was over that road where NATO was heading in while the long column of intact Serb armor was heading out. The Serbs were successful in hiding their armor against NATO because of simple decoys.

The only thing this new system does is do what was done before faster. 44 minutes is still a long time not including getting assets there to destroy whatever. Just remember that incident I think was around a decade ago when North Korea was shelling South Korea with howitzers. Because of South Korean hi-tech, they were able to pinpoint the exact position where the artillery were firing from and return fire. But it was still too late. The North Koreans were faster moving their artillery pieces out before South Korea return fire got there.
 
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Richard Santos

Captain
Registered Member
Again, NATO anti-armor doctrine from the Cold War focused on engaging Warsaw Pact armor that are maneuvering for land battle. Decoys by nature have little role in an actively maneuvering and advancing armored force because they take up valuable road capacity along the axis of advance and weaken the ability of the attacking force to focus strength at critical points of contact.

Decoys are useful largely in depots and staging areas, not areas of operational maneuver. NATO doctrine called for Stationary armor or armor in staging areas were to be engaged with tactical nuclear weapons.

If the Serbian armor force has to maneuver to engage an enemy armored force, then I bet NATO Air attack would have exterminated it near the point of contact. In Iraq, it wasn’t really just the desert that allowed the US to decimate iraqi armor, it was also the fact of the most modern and effective components of Iraqi armor attempted to maneuver. Much of the NATO Air land battle concept starting from mid 1970s had depended on advancements in radar technology that allows airborne surveillance radar to rapidly detect and identify all the individual moving vehicles over a large area, and quickly identify main thrusts of,ground forces to engage.

But this is besides the point. It seems highly unlikely for the ability to engage Chinese armor on Chinese mainland to have much impact on any hostility between China and the US. The issue is whether precision long range attack weapons can significantly degrade Chinese nuclear capability. I think the safe bet is no. Precision strike can not significantly diminish the Chinese mobile missile force.

1st of all, TELs, unlike tanks, doesn’t haven to concentrate in one place or clog available road capacity to bring the enemy to action. 2, Unlike with tanks, which are numerous and not particularly high value assets, Each nuclear missile is a national asset, and it is well worth creating 5-10 completely functional TEL for each live missile, so that there would literally be no difference between the the 10 decoy and the 1 real thing except whether the canister contains a live missile.

It could even be arranged so the crew who man the TEL doesn’t even know whether their vehicle has a live missile or a dummy. Any arms control or limitation treaty can be enforced by periodically calling a marked portion of TEL fleet into a central location to verify there is only a legal number of missiles amongst them. But once the inspectors leave, and the TEL drives out form the depot onto their deployment areas, there would literally be no way to tell which one has the missiles.
 

AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
It is the same. This new system will look at satellite images for SAM sites and nukes. During the time I wrote my initial post I saw pics of Chinese SAM decoys on the Chinese forums. That new fancy hi-tech system won't be able to tell if it's a decoy or not. It only speeds up the time from what a human being alone can do to analyze. It's doesn't tell them if it's real or not. The EU is complaining about China making too many inflatable rafts. So many they're literally blaming China for the European refugee crisis. How many decoys do you think China can produce?

44 minutes from what a human can do is still not enough time. Will this system know when a DF-41 comes out of a bunker or tunnel and then assets are informed where the target is for them to get there in time to destroy before launch all in 44 minutes? Most likely a DF-41 will pop out and launch and this new fancy system will never catch it because you won't know where those missiles are in the first place. Even if it could spot high value targets in real time immediately, it's probably already too late. Just because it can spot it, it doesn't mean you can destroy it.
 

Richard Santos

Captain
Registered Member
It is the same. This new system will look at satellite images for SAM sites and nukes. During the time I wrote my initial post I saw pics of Chinese SAM decoys on the Chinese forums. That new fancy hi-tech system won't be able to tell if it's a decoy or not. It only speeds up the time from what a human being alone can do to analyze. It's doesn't tell them if it's real or not. The EU is complaining about China making too many inflatable rafts. So many they're literally blaming China for the European refugee crisis. How many decoys do you think China can produce?

44 minutes from what a human can do is still not enough time. Will this system know when a DF-41 comes out of a bunker or tunnel and then assets are informed where the target is for them to get there in time to destroy before launch all in 44 minutes? Most likely a DF-41 will pop out and launch and this new fancy system will never catch it because you won't know where those missiles are in the first place. Even if it could spot high value targets in real time immediately, it's probably already too late. Just because it can spot it, it doesn't mean you can destroy it.


Most likely road mobile Df-41 will Leave their bunkers and disperse amongst the Chinese road system in time of war threat. There will probably be many more TELs than missiles. When this happens the TELs will move to widely separated locations from each other, and be at widely varying ranges from the source of any conventional attacking assets seeking to take them out.

Given that each DF-41 can hit the US with 10-15 nuclear warheads, and the Chinese will certainly launch any surviving DF-41 if a few others were knocked out by surprise strikes, the conventional strike aimed at the Chinese deterrent would have an almost impossible task. They must not only guaranty the destruction of all Chinese TELs, but do so within at most a couple of minutes of each other to prevent the first to be hit from acting as a trigger that causes all the other still surviving to be launched against the US. When the TELs are dispersed across the entire Chinese road network, it is nearly impossible just form the perspective of the varying distance the attacker has to travel to hit them to ensure they are destroyed within minutes of each other.
 
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Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
Another day another test a relentless drive to perfect the DF 41

New Chinese ballistic fire scheduled on Nov 6 at 08:02 UTC, the fallout zone is identical to that of the shooting of the ICBM DF-41 at 4 Dec 2015.

DN37NeUVoAAj5Rj.jpg



DN37b1yU8AAibi3.jpg
 
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