Insider : China Upgrading Nuclear Arms, Experts Say : Beijing is also developing new missile systems, including better ICBMs, to deliver the warheads, they believe.

When China carried out an underground nuclear test Oct. 5, its action was widely perceived as a political message, a gesture of defiance aimed at President Clinton and the U.S. Congress.

Many believed, as one international human rights activist put it, that China was “thumbing its nose at the United States”--particularly since the 90-kiloton blast came a scant two weeks after Beijing’s campaign for the 2000 Olympic Games, for which Washington had little enthusiasm, ended in humiliating defeat.

But in the month since then, the small coterie of U.S. government experts and scholars who study the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and its nuclear weapons program have concluded that China conducted the nuclear test for military purposes--ones that had little to do with the touchy state of relations between Washington and Beijing.

“It’s clear to me that the test was not done for political reasons,” says one Pentagon official. The test broke a yearlong international moratorium on nuclear testing that the Clinton Administration had hoped would continue.

Rather, the official explained, last month’s explosion at China’s Lop Nor testing site in the Xinjiang region was part of a series of tests in which the PLA is rushing to develop “follow-on systems” for its strategic nuclear forces.

“The purpose was definitely modernization (of nuclear weapons),” said Bonnie Glaser, a Washington-based consultant on Chinese defense strategy. “The Chinese are moving ahead.”

So what is China doing?

“In the late 1980s, the Chinese decided they needed serious testing and development to bring their strategic nuclear deterrent up to international standards,” explained Ronald S. Montaperto, a former Defense Intelligence Agency specialist now working at the Institute for National Strategic Studies.

“To do that, they needed some new warheads,” he said. “They wanted something that was smaller, more deployable, more accurate.”

Specialists note that China also carried out two underground nuclear tests in 1992, one of them a one-megaton blast that was China’s largest ever and was 500 times the size of the bomb that exploded at Hiroshima. China has carried out 39 nuclear tests since it acquired the bomb in 1964 and has been testing at the rate of about once a year in the past decade.

Along with the new warheads, these specialists say, China has been developing new missile systems, including better intercontinental ballistic missiles.

“The Chinese are moving from these first- or second-generation liquid-fuel missiles to more mobile, more accurate solid-fuel missiles,” says Timothy McCarthy, senior analyst at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

This has happened with every nuclear missile program in the world, McCarthy notes. The pattern is to move toward missiles with solid fuel, which can be more easily moved from place to place, and with better guidance systems. And new missile systems require new warheads as well.

McCarthy, who also writes for Jane’s Intelligence Review, said he believes China is developing a new ICBM similar to the Soviet SS-25. It would be a more accurate version of China’s current ICBM, the DF-5, which has a range of about 8,000 miles and could reach the United States.

Specialists on weapons proliferation also link China’s nuclear tests to missile programs. “The best explanation for why they are testing that I can figure out is that they need smaller warheads for new multiple-warhead missiles that they are developing,” says Henry Sokolski, a former Pentagon official.

China’s long-range missiles and ICBMs, first tested in 1970 and 1971, were originally planned to be able to reach Guam and the continental United States respectively. But many of these were eventually targeted on the Soviet Union--particularly after border skirmishes broke out and China and the Soviet Union came close to war in 1969.

Asked whether some of the Chinese ICBMs once aimed at Soviet territory have now been aimed at the United States, a Pentagon specialist replied, “I don’t think there’s been any major shift.”

But other experts on Chinese nuclear forces say they were designed with the United States in mind and that they must be a factor in American military planning.

“They (the Chinese missiles) can reach Kansas City,” notes Chong-pin Lin of the American Enterprise Institute. “And with the improvement of China’s strategic deterrent, China can complicate the calculus of Washington if the United States should want to intervene militarily somewhere around China’s periphery.”

If it neutralizes the possibility of American military intervention in Asia, Lin believes, China can use its conventional weapons to intimidate its neighbors.

“China may never use the nuclear weapons, but the upgrading of its nuclear arsenal will be translated into a threat in foreign policy, economics and other non-military areas,” he says.

Lin is particularly concerned about the possibility of nuclear blackmail by China in its dealings with Taiwan. In contrast, Pentagon planners, who are responsible for worrying first of all about the protection of the United States, find less cause for alarm in China’s developing nuclear program.

“China’s nuclear weapons are a deterrent,” says a Defense Department official. “If potential enemies have nuclear weapons, you need them to be able to retaliate. China’s nuclear arsenal is modest in terms of numbers, in comparison with that of the United States or the former Soviet Union. And they (the Chinese) are not preparing to have a run at matching our numbers as we come down (under existing arms-control treaties).”

All the experts agree that China is rushing to finish up its current series of nuclear tests because it can see the momentum building around the world for a treaty that imposes a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing.

“Chinese military leaders know they will soon be under pressure to get into international arms control. They need this technological advance (in their weapons program), so they don’t lose anything when a freeze goes into effect,” Montaperto says.

Last July, President Clinton announced that the United States would halt nuclear testing for another 15 months, so long as other nuclear powers observed the informal moratorium. And in a September speech to the U.N. General Assembly, he publicly called upon China to abandon what U.S. intelligence officials had reported were preparations for a new nuclear test.

Some of the U.S. China hands believe Clinton’s action was unwise because the most the United States could ever have expected from the Beijing leadership was a delay, not cancellation, of the nuclear test.

“I thought it was particularly clumsy of this Administration to have the President call upon China at the United Nations for the nuclear test not to take place,” says Douglas Paal, former head of Asian affairs for the George Bush Administration’s National Security Council. “Anyone who knows China knows that would guarantee the test would take place.”

Within hours after the Oct. 5 explosion in China, Clinton ordered the Energy Department to make preparations for the United States to resume underground nuclear testing next year. He stopped short of saying for sure that the American tests will start up again. It was a reminder of the extent to which China is now helping set America’s foreign policy agenda.