I have written recent blog posts about Chinese nuclear weapons and policy. There are conflicting accounts of exactly how many nuclear warheads China currently possesses and what their policy really is. Some of these accounts are obviously false. Whether intentional or accidental, there are fake news stories circulating about China's nuclear arsenal.
The Dongfeng-41(DF-41) is a Chinese road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile. It has an operational range of seventy-five hundred to ninety-three hundred miles and is the longest range ICBM in the world. Each DF-41 can carry ten nuclear warheads with independent reentry vehicles. The project has been in development for decades and is a response to the development of U.S. anti-missile defense systems.
The test of a DF-41 was first mentioned in western media in 2012 and the U.S. DoD first mentioned the development of a new Chinese missile without naming the DF-41 in 2013. A video of a new missile on the road in a Chinese city surfaced around then and prompted a flurry of speculatory stories about the new Chinese missile. A Chinese environmental monitoring website accidentally posted an item about DF-41 tests in 2014 which was the first official admission by the Chinese of the existence of the new missile. By 2016, the Chinese had conducted seven tests of the DF-41.
On January 24th of 2017, a story in Popular Mechanics claimed that the Chinese government "publicly announced the deployment" of the DF-41 and that announcement "is likely a warning to U.S. President Donald Trump, who is known for sharply worded anti-Chinese rhetoric and has announced plans for a new ballistic missile system." Two days later The Independent ran the same story with the same claims. The Sun, the Daily Caller, the International Business Times, the Moscow Times, Quora.com, ZeroHedge.com, STRATFOR, TASS, RT, and Sputnik International all followed with similar stories.
Breitbart ran the same story with the same claims on January 27. The Breitbart story included the additional claim that so-called deployment of the missile in Heilongjiang province, which shares a border with the Russia, is a prelude to an "approaching Clash of Civilizations world war" where "Russia and the United States will be allied against China." It is interesting to note that Steve Bannon, who ran Breitbart until he became Trump's senior advisor believes strongly in a "Clash of Civilizations" conflict.
Several years ago, a professor at George Town University revisited old rumors about the Chinese nuclear arsenal that claimed that it was ten times as big as was being estimated by the U.S. DoD. These claims have been proven to be false. Dr. Peter Navarro who is an advisor to Trump has repeated these false assertions in a recent book. Trump has asked his Secretary of Defense to review the U.S. nuclear arsenal and policies. Trump is pushing for an expensive upgrade to U.S. nuclear forces that may have been prompted by unfounded fears of a huge hidden Chinese nuclear arsenal. Fake news about supposed Chinese missiles and secret stockpiles of nuclear warheads are a poor basis for the formulation of U.S. nuclear policy.
DF-41:
