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There are three major nuclear powers on Earth. The U.S. and Russia both have thousands of nuclear warheads. It has been estimated that the detonation of one hundred nuclear warheads could destroy human civilization and threaten the existence of the human race. This means that between the U.S. and Russia, they could destroy humanity more than a hundred times over. This does seem a bit excessive.
The third nuclear power, China, is thought to only have a small number of nuclear warheads and says that it will not use them unless attacked. While China does not make public the extent of its nuclear arsenal, nevertheless, there is enough public information about China’s weapons to make a well-informed guess about the number of nuclear warheads it possesses.
It is documented that China had produced a small amount of weapons-grade plutonium when it joined an agreement to limit such production a few decades ago. China has also detonated a few test nuclear devices. These two facts limit the possible future quantity and quality of China’s nuclear arsenal.
It is accepted that China does have a few hundred nuclear warheads. It also has enough weapons-grade plutonium to make a few hundred more. The U.S. has three thousand eight hundred nuclear warheads counting both operational and reserve. It has enough weapons-grade plutonium to make roughly five thousand more warheads.
China could use its ground based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) to deliver up to one hundred of their warheads to targets in the U.S. It also will soon have sixty more warheads that it can use to hit the U.S. with submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM). The U.S. has four hundred nuclear warheads on its ground-based ICBMs and about nine hundred on SLBMs. The U.S. also has about a thousand nuclear gravity bombs and about five hundred nuclear armed cruise missiles that can be delivered by airplanes. China does not have any nuclear warheads that can be delivered by aircraft.
Checking these numbers, it becomes obvious that the current rate of increase in Chinese nuclear warheads will never allow China to even come close to equaling the total number of U.S. warheads. Even it the U.S. does not add any new nuclear warheads to its nuclear arsenal for decades, it will be easy to maintain nuclear superiority over China.
In addition to the obvious quantitative advantage that the U.S. has over China in nuclear warheads, the U.S. also has a significance superiority in the quality of nuclear weapons. The U.S. detonated over a thousand nuclear test devices before it signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996. These test detonations allowed the U.S. to test many different warhead designs and perfect the maximum yield of a giving quantity of plutonium. The U.S. now has seven different types of nuclear warheads including two type which can be adjusted for different yields. U.S. nuclear warheads have thirteen different yields between a third of a megaton and one and two tenths megatons.
Please read Part 2