Reuters claimed on Monday to have viewed a draft report from the Pentagon that said China “is likely to have loaded more than 100 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) across its latest three silo fields” which are located near the Mongolian border.
According to Reuters, the Pentagon believes China has quietly loaded over a hundred solid-fueled DF-31 ICBMs” into its new silos.
Commercial satellite imagery revealed in June 2021 that China was building an immense field of missile silos near the northwestern city of Yumen, which is south of the Mongolian border. The field covered hundreds of square miles, and boasted 119 construction sites that were identical to China’s existing nuclear missile silos.
Further satellite photos taken a month later captured a second silo field of comparable size under construction near the city of Hami, about 240 miles northwest of the Yumen field. The Hami field was in a much earlier state of development than Yumen but appeared to be large enough to hold 110 to 120 silos.
The third silo field was spotted by satellites in August 2021, although construction had probably begun several months earlier. It is located near the township of Hanggin Banner, Inner Mongolia; while roughly comparable in land area to the Yumen and Hami fields, it appeared to have fewer silos under construction.
Unlike the other two sites, Hanggin Banner did not have an existing local garrison from the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF), so its silo field represented a significant geographical extension of China’s ICBM arsenal.
Analysts noted that China has a penchant for building decoy silos, so it was possible that both fields included far more construction sites than they needed for the amount of missiles China planned to install — but even if fewer than half of their silos were filled, the three new silo fields would represent an enormous increase in China’s launch capabilities.
The Dong Feng 31 (DF-31) is a three-stage solid-fuel missile that was introduced in 2006. It can be deployed in both road-mobile and silo-launched configurations. The original model had a range of just under 5,000 miles, but the upgraded DF-31A variant can reportedly hit targets up to 6,800 miles away which would give it enough range to hit the West Coast of the United States from launchers near Mongolia.
When construction of China’s new silo fields was noted in 2021, China’s nuclear arsenal was believed to include less than 350 warheads, but the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists believes China has increased that inventory to about 600 warheads, with more in production. This led the Bulletin to conclude that China has “the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal among the nine nuclear-armed states.”
The draft Pentagon report viewed by Reuters said China’s rate of nuclear weapons production has slowed in recent years, but it is still on track to reach 1,000 warheads by 2030.
The Pentagon report said Beijing appears to have “no appetite” for pursuing denuclearization or joining a trilateral nuclear arms treaty as President Donald Trump has proposed.
Reuters said the Pentagon “declined to comment” on its report, while the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC repeated Beijing’s standard boilerplate about maintaining a purely “defensive” nuclear strategy with the “minimum level” of missiles needed for national security.