China Ballistic Missiles and Nuclear Arms Thread

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Broccoli

Senior Member
You keep asserting this but you've presented zero evidence for it. Why should we take your word for it?

Why should I take your fanboy bullshit seriously? If you want to believe that nuclear reactors can just appear from thin air and dont need any people to run or maintain them that's your choice... throw 5000 nuclear warhead arsenal on top of that fantasy if you feel it makes your dingus bigger.


Of course you also forget that legally Chinese govt could start producing new fissile materials without any problems so why would they do that in secret since they claim they aren't doing it? Are you saying that Chinese government is lying and they produce fissile materials for weapons despite denying it? They could just make more if they wanted.
 

ZeEa5KPul

Colonel
Registered Member
Why should I take your fanboy bullshit seriously?
What bullshit would that be? You make assertions about plutonium production that neither I nor anyone else here should take seriously. Are you a nuclear engineer or subject matter expert? What are your qualifications? Btw, raging about my purported "fantasies" doesn't do anything for your credibility, so take a Xanax before you respond.
 

Sardaukar20

Captain
Registered Member
You can't really hide plutonium production and that's why Iran has gone HEU route. For plutonium production you actually need working reactor and it's not easy to hide, maybe even impossible to hide, while centrifuges are actually relatively easy to hide in comparison. Hiding a multiple nuclear reactors for plutonium production is nearly impossible.

Nuclear reactors can be detecter from air samples, heat signatures, satellites, cooling methods needed for reactor operations, people including thise who build it and use it and their footprint etc... I have written before that we aren't living in an computer game where you push a button and that's it.
In a way this is correct. Plutonium production, especially weapons grade plutonium is not easily hidden or achieved with commercial nuclear reactors.

Plutonium forms and burns off before a full nuclear fuel cycle is complete. So in order to extract plutonium, a typical commercial nuclear reactor needs to be shut down in the middle of the nuclear fuel cycle. With IAEA doing inspections, this is not easy to hide.

The notoriously dangerous Soviet RBMK reactor was designed specifically to allow fuel extraction without shut down. Good for plutonium production. But China doesn't operate such reactors to allow hidden plutonium production.

The only way for China to quietly produce plutonium is with hidden breeder reactors. Still the uranium that fuels these reactors could be tracked by IAEA inspectors.

I don't know if China really has hidden plutonium production. It is kinda pointless anyway. China is already a major nuclear power, just produce the fissile materials openly. All the other major nuclear powers do that. Who could realistically stop China from doing so, short of war?

China could just make their production of weapons grade fissile materials an open secret. If some countries are concerned, tell the world that Uncle Sam and India are making China do it through their aggressive nuclear threats.
 

Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
Plutonium production has both heat and radioactive signs what you can't hide from monitoring equipment. HEU production is harder to detect (see Iran & Noth-korea) but as far we know all China's warheads since 1970s have used plutonium pits and downside of U-235 pit is that it would make warhead larger aka can't deploy as many mirvs per missile.

Here is article about how US could arm it's forces with modern uranium warhead and what it would look like vs what they got now.
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That is completely BS what heat and radioactive sign Plutonium can be produced from natural uranium using either heavy water or graphite reactor or enrichment Heavy water reactor like candu power plant is big and you can see it from the air But you can also built reactor with graphite moderator that can fit in factory setting or built underground It does not require water The only thing it is not safe Chernobyl is graphite moderated power plant.

Not all power plant require cooling tower You use cooling tower if there is no water source available like in the dessert The estimation of plutonium production based on power plant size ahem cooling tower size is just guess-stimate
Now can you built nuclear power plant underground. You bet they have nuclear submarine don't they?

Another thing it completely inaccurate to say using plutonium will make the warhead bigger contrary it make is smaller

China has a lot of power plant some of it built with foreign technology and china sign nuclear proliferation treaty meaning those plutonium production is tracked an monitor. So it cannot be diverted to making bomb
But China has also domestic nuclear technology and nobody can tracked that,

The only thing it need plutonium extraction or reprocessing plant and the best is foreign technology
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Another route is Uranium enrichment and you can build centrifuge plant underground Iranian did it
For nuclear weapons, especially those such as ballistic missile warheads where minimising mass is important, plutonium is the way to go. Its critical mass is around 1/5 that of U-235, which scales everything down in volume as well as mass. Designing weapons with plutonium is more difficult, but plutonium can be produced starting from natural uranium in compact facilities which are easier to conceal and protect against enemy action, as opposed to uranium enrichment plants which are extravagantly large and require materials which, when procured on the open market, raise eyebrows.

Plutonium may be easier to get, but it's harder to use. The weapon design is more demanding and, compared to a uranium gun bomb, without testing it's difficult to be sure the bomb will go boom. While it used to be said that every country which had tried to build a nuclear weapon had succeeded on the first try, this is no longer the case: the
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, believed to be a plutonium implosion device, appears to have had a fizzle yield of 0.48 kilotons. Basing one's strategy on nuclear deterrence with plutonium weapons which have never been tested is risky in the extreme, although demonstrating the infrastructure may create sufficient ambiguity that adversaries are disinclined to roll the dice.
 

Xizor

Captain
Registered Member
Maybe you should write books for Tom Clancy universe.
I understand that there indeed lies a scope for "fanboy fantasy". I am someone who has maintained that nuclear weapons are costly and dangerous to maintain and beyond a certain number (800-1000), makes little sense.

But my query was simply to ponder if China could do that.

Almost all mentions of China's nuclear warhead numbers end up with the very sure assumption that China has a limited bank of fissile material to make bombs with.

I am merely asking why not challenge that assumption. What if China operated some? Whether it was possible.

We have seen China take a quantum leap with regards to the quality of delivery options (stealth bombers, Cruise missiles, hypersonics, IRBM, MRBM, SLBM, ICBM etc). Even nuclear torpedoes (like the Russian posedon) can't be assured to be not considered. The warhead numbers and fissile materials to back up these delivery options aren't there.

There exists little to no upto date evidence to back up anything regarding Chinese nuclear weapons.

And no, I don't dream of China one day throwing a surprise by acknowledging that it is in possession of 5000 warheads and 50 tons of high enriched plutonium.
 

Anlsvrthng

Captain
Registered Member
You keep asserting this but you've presented zero evidence for it. Why should we take your word for it?

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Some 27 tonnes of fresh enriched fuel is required each year by a 1000 MWe reactor.

Means it takes 1.1 tonnes of U-235/year for 1 GWe. ( 4.5 % enrichment) . There is same U-235 left in the waste as well

Leftower easy, reactor breeding ratio is 0.8-1.5, means can make from one kg of U235 0.8-1.6 kg of Pu239.


0.8 is the breeding ratio of a good commercial reactor .

So, an 1GWe reactor can make 880-1600 kg of Pu239 per year.
So to start making Pu239 you have to hid a 3 GW thermal capacity heat source, for years.
 
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totenchan

Junior Member
Registered Member
If it really, really, REALLY wanted to, China could probably restart fissile material production of Pu without anyone noticing. It would involve a lot of money, a lot of equipment, and a lot of time, but it could be done. Production of HEU would be a lot easier to hide, but China's fissile material is Pu, so that isn't too relevant. This raises another question though: why in the world would China want to? China currently retains around 300 warheads, and this is more then enough. The absurd stockpiles maintained by the United States and the Soviet Union are relics of an paranoid and irrational Cold War mindset and have absolutely no basis in reality. Cold War estimates gave forty 1 megaton warheads the ability to instantly kill 20 percent of the U.S. population, even disregarding the later deaths from factors such as radiation and destroyed infrastructure. Given that the percentage of the U.S. population that has moved into cities since then, the human toll from the same amount of warheads is likely to be far more significant today. Unless China has designs to move away from its minimum deterrence nuclear policy, which it has followed faithfully for decades, and into some sort of counterforce posture, China's current nuclear stockpile is more then enough.

What China currently arguably lacks is effective delivery systems. The introduction of the DF-41 does improve the survivability of the Chinese nuclear forces by quite a bit, but last I checked they have not been widely deployed. DF-31 and their variants are mobile and thus survivable, but they have limited range. DF-5s, which make up the bulk of China's silo based ICBMs, are very vulnerable and are liquid-fuelled, meaning they must go through a lengthy fueling process before they can be launched. As far as BMD, current BMD systems are very limited, and have never (to my knowledge) been tested against countermeasures, which Chinese missiles are sure to have. Limited warheads are not an issue here if countermeasures are effective, and it shouldn't be possible to discriminate the re-entry vehicle with the warhead, which would mean that all vehicles would need to be intercepted. If China can demonstrate that its nuclear weapons are survivable and have a good chance of reaching their targets, deterrence is assured unless the U.S. elects a raving suicidal lunatic to the White House. The number of warheads China has, in this case, is enough, more then enough, and even borders on excessive.
 
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