Recent visitors to the bay surrounding a submarine base on the southern coast of...
HONG KONG - Recent visitors to the bay surrounding a submarine base on the southern coast of China’s Hainan Island describe a curious nocturnal phenomenon. Powerful spotlights are sometimes trained directly on the ocean frontages of neighboring hotels at night, making visibility out to sea virtually impossible. Some of the lights are mounted on land and others on passing naval patrol boats.
Taken together, this means China has a force of missile submarines that can launch nuclear attacks from beneath the waves and now appear to be heading out on patrols, according to serving and retired naval officers, diplomats and security analysts. That gives Beijing something it has until recently lacked: a more reliable “second strike” capability if its land-based nuclear arsenal comes under attack.
China’s Ministry of National Defense, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the Pentagon did not respond to questions from Reuters. “China’s military modernization is consistent with its rapid economic growth,” the Australian Department of Defense said. “As with all countries, we encourage China to be transparent about its military capabilities and strategic intentions to provide greater assurance to its neighbors.”“An armed Jin-class SSBN will give China an important strategic capability that must be countered,” Admiral Harry Harris, then head of the U.S. Pacific Command, told a congressional committee last year.
In the past two decades, the PLA Rocket Force, the service which controls China’s nuclear and conventional missiles, has invested heavily in expanding its stockpile of nuclear warheads and boosted the range and accuracy of the missiles that deliver them. It has also hardened the protection of its silo-based nuclear weapons, according to reports in China’s state-controlled media.
While acknowledging that China has significantly enhanced its nuclear deterrence, the Pentagon isn’t convinced that Chinese subs are yet conducting around-the-clock patrols. In a January report, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency said the Chinese navy would need a minimum of five Jin-class submarines to maintain a continuous nuclear deterrence at sea. China now has four.
In the north, the Yellow Sea is too shallow to conceal big, ballistic missile submarines. The East China Sea is deeper but it’s confined by the Korean Peninsula, Japan’s island chain and Taiwan. The sub fleet’s vulnerability to detection also explains China’s extreme sensitivity to the surveillance operations of the United States and its allies in these waters. A Chinese destroyer sailed within 45 meters of the American destroyer USS Decatur in late September, as the American warship patrolled in the Spratlys, a highly contested island chain where China has expanded its foothold in recent years. It was the latest in a series of close encounters in the past decade.
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