Exaggerated Threat: The truth about China's Nuclear Arsenal?

An exaggerated threat of weapons of mass destruction? The west getting its intelligence skewed? Well, now that is without precedent, is it not?

Seriously, though, the whole increase in military buildup wherever it is, is very frightening to me. I remember hiding under desks during atom bomb drills when I was little. The threat was very real and immediate. Deja vu.

Strictly speaking, there isn't actually a military buildup in China's case.

Despite increasing its military spending dramatically, China's military is actually smaller than it has been for decades.

It shed over 1 million men and used the money to provide better equippment and training to the ones that remained.

It also threw a lot more money into buying comunications equippment, upgradeing machinery that was 20 years out of date, and ensuring that its officers were of the higest quality.

Don't think militarization, think modernization.

Read this, it explains some it in more detail.

http://angrychineseblogger.blog-city.com/chinas_new_great_leap_forward.htm

"the west getting its intelligence skewed? Well, now that is without precedent, is it"

There's a long story behind this. But here's the short version.

Originally, the China threat was hyped by people who:

1) feared the spread of comunism across Asia and wanted ot give Washington a good reason to clamp down on communist China 2) feared that the government would cut spending on US forces in the Pacific 3) feared that the nuclear deterent would be maintained but not upgrade without a 'significant threat' for it to be directed against once Russia calmed down.

Today, China's threat is being hyped by people who

1) fear that America's conventional military will be almost compeletely restructured in order to fight the war on terror unless it has a conventional enemy left to fight 2) that America will reduce its a Pacific forces to a maintenance level, and use the rest to fight the war on terror 3) want to boost the US economy by getting Taiwan and Japan to pay for expensive US weapon.

Here's an article from last year:

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj05lewis

"Perhaps your anxiety about "marginal improvements" to China's missile force would recede as you learned that China's 18 ICBMs, sitting unfueled in their silos, their nuclear warheads in storage, are essentially the same as they were the day China began deploying them in 1981."

If you read look at the stats, China's missile force is essentiall short to mid ranged, and designed mostly to target areas imediately beyond its borders.

There are offensive missiles aimed at Taiwan, and retalitory missiles aimed at Russia and India.

Pretty much everything other than these is aimed at Okinawa and Guam.

From this, it's quite easy to see that China isn't an active threat to the west, and that it has no intention of being so. The only people in danger from Chinese misisles are Taiwan and pottential agressors at the local level.

In fact, compared to its overall spending,China has spent practically nothing on the long ranged weapons that it would need to fight the kind of apocolyptic death war that America's entire missile arsenal is specifically designed for.

Bureaucracies will always do whatever they can to perpetuate themselves and the military is no different. The more scarier China appears to the U.S. populace, the more money the U.S. military gets. Our job is to maintain our scepticism.

Bureaucracies will always do whatever they can to perpetuate themselves and the military is no different. The more scarier China appears to the U.S. populace, the more money the U.S. military gets. Our job is to maintain our scepticism.

You act like the Chinese governmnet is so peaceful and passive. You can't just sit and home and mind your own business (which includes low standards of living and oppressing minorities and interest groups) and dabble into nuclear weapons like its just a hobby, a little project... and threaten action if anything ever gets serious with taiwan (just give up you have nothing to do with each other for 50 years now). Why are you so set on convincing people china is an exaggerated threat? Why are the chinese spying on everyone? I really hope they cooperate with the west, come around and help make the world a better place, not exploit their own people to aggrandize the country's power. I know a lot of chinese are proud people, but you can't tell me a lot of them don't have superiority complexes that even seem to be taught sometimes which is not healthy. I hope nothing ever happens cause there would be some f'n massive internment camps all over the world....and I wouldn't be able to go to Peking House and get combo 2 chicken balls, ginger beef, mixed vegetables, fried rice and an egg roll! mmmmm...unless those sneaky chinese bastards are trying to make us all unhealthily fat and lazy with their greasy food! haha Also my one chinese friend during school was an asshole, and so were a bunch of other chinese students....one kid very unstable.....mostly from taiwan though.....asians of other origins were much friendlier in my limited experience.

"You act like the Chinese government is so peaceful and passive"

Read my blog a bit more, I regularly accuse Beijing of genocide, mass human rights abuses and all kinds of horrors that Fox doesn't even touch on.

"Why are the Chinese spying on everyone"

Everyone is spying on everyone else, that's just how the world works. China spies and is spied upon too. Remember that big plane hat crashed on Hainan a couple of years back, that was a US spy plane.

"you can't tell me a lot of them don't have superiority complexes that even seem to be taught sometimes which is not healthy."

Most countries are the same. Last time I watched CBS I got a face full o'h "the American dream". It looked just like China, only with more NRA bumper stickers.

"unless those sneaky chinese bastards are trying to make us all unhealthily fat and lazy with their greasy food! "

Too right, you have Macdonald's for that.

"Also my one Chinese friend during school was an asshole,"

1) Why was he your friend is he was a complete hole? 2) I know plenty of whites like that too, but I don't claim that China made them that way.

It's so easy to point your finger to all that's wrong about a country. Sure, there is a lot that can and even must be improved about the Chinese government, bureaucracies, human rights etc, but overall China improved and is still improving at a high rate. We must not become too skeptical. Beside China's dark side (every country has those) it's also a beautiful place with more opportunities than imaginable according to most stories at http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/