Marshall Billingslea, a former presidential arms control official during the first Trump administration, recently warned Congress that China’s nuclear arsenal is expanding rapidly and has set off what he calls “Arm Race 2.0.”
Mr. Billingslea told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in testimony earlier this month that in 2020 he provided a classified briefing to the panel on China’s early stage of a “massive increasing in its nuclear arsenal.”
“Five years later, the grim assessment I delivered to you back then now seems to have been overly optimistic,” he stated in prepared testimony. “China has proceeded at breathtaking pace.”
The Chinese military has now deployed more than 600 operational warheads and is ahead of schedule in fielding 1,000 weapons by 2030, he said, adding that Beijing is expected to have 1,500 warheads by 2035.
“That is roughly equivalent to what both the U.S. and
Russia field today, and I believe China may ultimately exceed that number by a wide margin,” Mr. Billingslea said.
The Chinese nuclear expansion included three new ICBM fields in the past few years with the total number of silo launchers to about 400.
“That is more silos than we have,” he said. “China has also been recently discovered building 30 new silos for its DF-5 ICBMs in the mountainous regions of central-eastern China. The new DF-5C will be able to carry a multimegaton warhead — a so-called ‘city buster’ — or may be deployed with 10 warheads.”
The U.S. has no similar megaton-class warhead.
Additional strategic capabilities include new low-yield warheads and a fractional orbital bombardment system that Mr. Billingslea said “could be used in a decapitation first-strike scenario.”
