China’s Missile Advances Could Thwart U.S. Defenses, Analysts Say
By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG — China is moving ahead with the development of a new and more capable generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched missiles, increasing its existing ability to deliver nuclear warheads to the United States and to overwhelm missile defense systems, military analysts said this week.

Overall, China’s steady strengthening of its military capabilities for conventional and nuclear warfare has long caused concern in Congress and among American allies in East Asia, particularly lately as Chinese has taken a more assertive position regarding territorial claims in the East China and South China seas.

The Global Times, a newspaper directly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, reported on Wednesday that China was developing the capability to put multiple warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. But the newspaper disputed a report in Jane’s Defense Weekly that the latest Chinese ICBM, the Dongfeng-41, had already been tested last month.

Larry M. Wortzel, on the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a panel created by Congress, said that China was developing the capability to put as many as 10 nuclear warheads on an ICBM, although dummy warheads could be substituted for some of the nuclear warheads. The dummy warheads would have heat and electromagnetic devices designed to trick missile defense systems as being as threatening as the actual warheads, he said.

“The bigger implication of this is that as they begin to field a force of missiles with multiple warheads, it means everything we assume about the size of their nuclear arsenal becomes wrong,” said Mr. Wortzel, who is a former United States military intelligence officer and retired Army colonel.

China has separately tested submarine-launched missiles as well in recent weeks, which it could use to outflank American missile detection systems, Mr. Wortzel said. Most of the radar arrays that the United States has deployed against ballistic missiles were built during the cold war to detect attacks over polar routes.

Sun Zhe, a professor of international relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said that China was developing its military forces only in response to continued efforts by other countries, particularly the United States, to improve their own forces.

“We have again and again said that we will not be the first country to use nuclear force,” he said. “We need to be able to defend ourselves, and our main threat, I’m afraid, comes from the United States.”

China’s development of long-range missiles is part of a much broader military expansion made possible by rapid budget growth in tandem with the Chinese economy, which had an output of $7.5 trillion last year, compared with $1.2 trillion in 2000.

China began sea trials last year for its first aircraft carrier, the Varyag, a retrofitted version of a Soviet vessel, and has begun talking this summer about the eventual construction of up to five aircraft carriers. China also began conducting fairly public flight tests in January last year for the J-20, its new stealth fighter jet.

The scale of China’s strategic missile program is much more secret. The Pentagon estimates that China currently has 55 to 65 intercontinental ballistic missiles. China is also preparing two submarines for deployment, each with 12 missiles aboard, Mr. Wortzel said.

Those forces are dwarfed by those of the United States, which is cutting its inventory to 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons by 2018 under the latest arms control agreement with Russia, signed in 2010.

Western forecasts vary of how many Dongfeng-41s China will produce, with 20 to 32 mobile launching systems planned. The mobile launchers make it harder to find and destroy a missile before it is launched, and also raise the possibility that additional missiles could be hidden in storage and used to reload after the initial missile is fired.

If each missile has 10 nuclear warheads, that could result in a few hundred to several hundred nuclear weapons.

But Tom Z. Collina, the research director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, said that China might not actually deploy multiple warheads without first developing and testing smaller warheads. And China signed in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, agreeing not to conduct further nuclear tests.

“It’s not just an issue of whether they have a missile they could physically lift all those warheads, but whether they could fit all those warheads on a missile,” Mr. Collina said.

The United States has tried to reassure Russia and China that its limited ballistic missile defenses are only designed to shoot down one or a handful of missiles launched by a rogue state. But missile defense advocates in the United States favor more ambitious but also far costlier systems, a spirited debate that has been followed with nervousness in Moscow and Beijing.

The United States has been mulling where it can best place additional high-tech radar systems designed to track ballistic missiles. American forces currently have one in northern Japan and others that are deployed from time to time at sea. The Wall Street Journal reported this week on discussions of whether to put two more on land, in southern Japan and in Southeast Asia.

American officials have said repeatedly that their main concern is North Korea, which has been testing long-range missiles and developing nuclear weapons. But Chinese officials and experts have been deeply suspicious that American missile defense systems are aimed at their country’s forces as well.

“I have no doubt that the one of the goals of the missile defenses is to contain threats from North Korea, but objectively speaking, a high-tech expansion of U.S. military biceps impacts China, too,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. He added that discussions have taken place in China on whether to develop missile defense systems as well.

Adam Century contributed reporting and Mia Li contributed research from Beijing.