The Next China Military Threat: The World's Biggest Mobile ICBM?

[beijingwalker]

The Next China Military Threat: The World's Biggest Mobile ICBM?
With missile platforms like the KZ-21 China would have the means to seek nuclear superiority over Russia in the 2030s and beyond.

by Richard D. Fisher Jr. Thor E. Ronay
January 8, 2019

Russia’s RS-28 “Sarmat” ten-ton payload liquid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) will be the world’s largest nuclear strike missile when it enters production, as early as 2021. Reportedly it may carry up to fifteen 350 kiloton warheads, or up to twenty-four of the new “Avangard” nuclear-armed Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV) warheads.

But since mid–2017, Chinese sources have revealed details of an even larger twenty-ton payload solid-fuel space-launch vehicle (SLV) that could form the basis for what might become the world’s largest “mobile” ICBM.

In May 2017, the now closed Chinese website ChinaSpaceFlight.com offered the first depiction of the family of solid-fuel SLVs to be offered by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). Seen in this image for the first time was the twenty-ton payload Kuaizhou-21, or KZ-21, and the KZ-21A, which adds two side boosters.

Likely since the middle of the last decade, CASIC had been given the go-ahead by the Chinese government and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to develop a line of solid-fuel SLVs. These would compete for domestic and international launch services with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), which builds China’s family of Long March liquid-fueled SLVs and ICBMs, and its latest DF-31, DF-31A, and DF-41 mobile solid-fuel ICBMs.

So far, CASIC’s 1.2-meter diameter road-mobile Kauizhou-1/IA SLV, based on its DF-21 medium range ballistic missile, has made four successful launch missions through September 29, 2018. In 2019, CASIC may launch its first 2.2-meter diameter road-mobile and solid-fueled KZ-11 SLV, which has the same diameter as CASC’s DF-41 ICBM. The latter also forms the basis for CASC’s Long March-11 solid-fuel SLV, which has been launched five times as of December 21, 2018.


The KZ-21, however, features an unprecedented 4-meter diameter solid-fuel rocket motor, larger than the 3.7-meter diameter Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) developed by the former Thiokol Company to help launch the U.S. Space Shuttle. A ChinaDaily report from 25 December 2017 noted that CASIC would begin testing the engine for the KZ-21 in February 2018.

That month, an image appeared on Chinese web pages of CASIC engineers standing beside elements of the 4-meter solid rocket motor. There have been no subsequent reports or images to confirm successful testing of this engine, but Chinese sources indicate the KZ-21 SLV could be in service by 2025.


As in the United States and Russia, China has shown ample precedent for SLVs assisting the development of ICBMs, and vice-versa. CASC’s liquid-fueled DF-5 ICBM served as the basis for the Long March-1 SLV, and the multiple satellite-launching Long March-2C aided the follow-on development of the latest ten-warhead capable DF-5C.

To date, there has been no public Chinese suggestion that the KZ-21 will become the basis for the world’s largest solid-fuel ICBM, but it would be foolish to assume China’s strategic planners have decided to forego such an option. China may now be deploying its three-thousand-plus-kilometers range DF-17, armed with a small maneuverable HGV warhead. If sized similarly to Russia’s Avangard, a twenty-ton payload KZ-21 might carry close to fifty HGVs.

According to some Asian military sources, a PLA Rocket Force ICBM unit has about six missiles, which for the KZ-21 could approach three hundred warheads. Thus, potentially, five KZ-21-based ICBM units could nearly match the 1,550 warheads deployed each by the United States and Russia, pursuant to the 2010 New Start Treaty which expires in 2021. It is very likely that China could build transporter-erector-launchers (TELs) large enough to move KZ-21-based ICBMs a short distance from various nodes of the PLA Rocket Force’s (PLARF) “Underground Great Wall” of tunnel ICBM bases for quick staging.

Add to this the potential for CASIC’s KZ-1 and KZ-11 SLV production lines to also be turned to producing new mobile ICBMs. In that case, starting in the early 2020s, the PLA will have plenty of capacity to build ICBMs which could “sprint” to match or exceed the deployed nuclear warhead arsenals of Russia and the United States.

China does not reveal its current ICBM and warhead numbers. Despite decades of U.S. government attempts to engage PLA and political officials in preliminary dialogues on strategic weapons, China likely will continue rejecting suggestions that it begin to exercise strategic nuclear transparency. Instead, China has spent decades trying to convince the world that it has no ambitions for strategic nuclear superiority, will not engage in a nuclear arms race, adheres to a “No First Use” of nuclear weapons pledge, does not proliferate, and seeks merely to have an “assured” means of nuclear retaliation to deter nuclear attack.

Russia for decades ran a similar deception gambit, whilst at least it pretended to engage in normative arms control. It thusly co-opted generations of U.S. arms control devotees into believing that U.S. defense and verification actions—rather than Soviet ideology, strategic goals, capacities, and serial violations—were the main threat. U.S. arms controllers obsessively insisted the latter should be ignored or downplayed in order to “keep the Soviets at the table.” Unsurprisingly, Moscow regularly ran the table until Reagan called the game.

Given that such deception stratagems are even more central in China’s millennia of statecraft, U.S. policymakers must now be more vigilant and realistic, and apply the expensive lessons from decades of Soviet/Russian deception/ diversiya. The U.S. focus must be on Chinese goals, capabilities, and actions, and not on bringing them to the wormy table of arms control. China likely will continue to eschew the “arms control process,” unless it determines it must be exploited to better gain time, concessions, and U.S. self-constraint, per the Soviet/Russian example.

Until very recently, the United States largely has willfully deceived itself about converging Chinese threats, thus obviating the need for China to deign to engage in the arms control gambit. The dominant non-status quo power, China views arms control as another meddlesome aspect of the global state system whose architecture, legitimacy, and norms it rejects.

For decades, top Chinese leaders ritually have denied any ambitions for global “Hegemony.” Now, in 2019 it is increasingly clear that China seeks to reshape global economics and politics to serve the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership, and that it is building a PLA which could soon have the means to impose the CCP’s will regionally, globally, and in Space. Given such ambitions it seems highly likely that CCP leaders long ago decided they must attain nuclear superiority.

But even before such a nuclear buildup, it is imperative to consider the possibility of offensive nuclear cooperation between Russia and China, inasmuch as they have held two publicly announced “strategic defense” exercises in 2016 and 2017. Russia and China may calculate that such a nuclear “tilt” against the United States could be used to dissuade and deter U.S. military support for Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, or multiple Russian targets in Europe. However, with missile platforms like the KZ-21 China would have the means to seek nuclear superiority over Russia in the 2030s and beyond.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/next-china-military-threat-worlds-biggest-mobile-icbm-40952

 

[Foxtrot Delta]

That would be a minsterous ICBM. Cant imagine!

Having said that i don't think china has plans for global dominamce with force. They already a dominance economically without war. And economic power of china just keeps increasing. Chinese won't start a war unless u impose it on them.

 

[PeaceGen]

The Next China Military Threat: The World's Biggest Mobile ICBM?
With missile platforms like the KZ-21 China would have the means to seek nuclear superiority over Russia in the 2030s and beyond.

by Richard D. Fisher Jr. Thor E. Ronay
January 8, 2019

Russia’s RS-28 “Sarmat” ten-ton payload liquid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) will be the world’s largest nuclear strike missile when it enters production, as early as 2021. Reportedly it may carry up to fifteen 350 kiloton warheads, or up to twenty-four of the new “Avangard” nuclear-armed Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV) warheads.

But since mid–2017, Chinese sources have revealed details of an even larger twenty-ton payload solid-fuel space-launch vehicle (SLV) that could form the basis for what might become the world’s largest “mobile” ICBM.

In May 2017, the now closed Chinese website ChinaSpaceFlight.com offered the first depiction of the family of solid-fuel SLVs to be offered by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). Seen in this image for the first time was the twenty-ton payload Kuaizhou-21, or KZ-21, and the KZ-21A, which adds two side boosters.

Likely since the middle of the last decade, CASIC had been given the go-ahead by the Chinese government and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to develop a line of solid-fuel SLVs. These would compete for domestic and international launch services with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), which builds China’s family of Long March liquid-fueled SLVs and ICBMs, and its latest DF-31, DF-31A, and DF-41 mobile solid-fuel ICBMs.

So far, CASIC’s 1.2-meter diameter road-mobile Kauizhou-1/IA SLV, based on its DF-21 medium range ballistic missile, has made four successful launch missions through September 29, 2018. In 2019, CASIC may launch its first 2.2-meter diameter road-mobile and solid-fueled KZ-11 SLV, which has the same diameter as CASC’s DF-41 ICBM. The latter also forms the basis for CASC’s Long March-11 solid-fuel SLV, which has been launched five times as of December 21, 2018.


The KZ-21, however, features an unprecedented 4-meter diameter solid-fuel rocket motor, larger than the 3.7-meter diameter Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) developed by the former Thiokol Company to help launch the U.S. Space Shuttle. A ChinaDaily report from 25 December 2017 noted that CASIC would begin testing the engine for the KZ-21 in February 2018.

That month, an image appeared on Chinese web pages of CASIC engineers standing beside elements of the 4-meter solid rocket motor. There have been no subsequent reports or images to confirm successful testing of this engine, but Chinese sources indicate the KZ-21 SLV could be in service by 2025.


As in the United States and Russia, China has shown ample precedent for SLVs assisting the development of ICBMs, and vice-versa. CASC’s liquid-fueled DF-5 ICBM served as the basis for the Long March-1 SLV, and the multiple satellite-launching Long March-2C aided the follow-on development of the latest ten-warhead capable DF-5C.

To date, there has been no public Chinese suggestion that the KZ-21 will become the basis for the world’s largest solid-fuel ICBM, but it would be foolish to assume China’s strategic planners have decided to forego such an option. China may now be deploying its three-thousand-plus-kilometers range DF-17, armed with a small maneuverable HGV warhead. If sized similarly to Russia’s Avangard, a twenty-ton payload KZ-21 might carry close to fifty HGVs.

According to some Asian military sources, a PLA Rocket Force ICBM unit has about six missiles, which for the KZ-21 could approach three hundred warheads. Thus, potentially, five KZ-21-based ICBM units could nearly match the 1,550 warheads deployed each by the United States and Russia, pursuant to the 2010 New Start Treaty which expires in 2021. It is very likely that China could build transporter-erector-launchers (TELs) large enough to move KZ-21-based ICBMs a short distance from various nodes of the PLA Rocket Force’s (PLARF) “Underground Great Wall” of tunnel ICBM bases for quick staging.

Add to this the potential for CASIC’s KZ-1 and KZ-11 SLV production lines to also be turned to producing new mobile ICBMs. In that case, starting in the early 2020s, the PLA will have plenty of capacity to build ICBMs which could “sprint” to match or exceed the deployed nuclear warhead arsenals of Russia and the United States.

China does not reveal its current ICBM and warhead numbers. Despite decades of U.S. government attempts to engage PLA and political officials in preliminary dialogues on strategic weapons, China likely will continue rejecting suggestions that it begin to exercise strategic nuclear transparency. Instead, China has spent decades trying to convince the world that it has no ambitions for strategic nuclear superiority, will not engage in a nuclear arms race, adheres to a “No First Use” of nuclear weapons pledge, does not proliferate, and seeks merely to have an “assured” means of nuclear retaliation to deter nuclear attack.

Russia for decades ran a similar deception gambit, whilst at least it pretended to engage in normative arms control. It thusly co-opted generations of U.S. arms control devotees into believing that U.S. defense and verification actions—rather than Soviet ideology, strategic goals, capacities, and serial violations—were the main threat. U.S. arms controllers obsessively insisted the latter should be ignored or downplayed in order to “keep the Soviets at the table.” Unsurprisingly, Moscow regularly ran the table until Reagan called the game.

Given that such deception stratagems are even more central in China’s millennia of statecraft, U.S. policymakers must now be more vigilant and realistic, and apply the expensive lessons from decades of Soviet/Russian deception/ diversiya. The U.S. focus must be on Chinese goals, capabilities, and actions, and not on bringing them to the wormy table of arms control. China likely will continue to eschew the “arms control process,” unless it determines it must be exploited to better gain time, concessions, and U.S. self-constraint, per the Soviet/Russian example.

Until very recently, the United States largely has willfully deceived itself about converging Chinese threats, thus obviating the need for China to deign to engage in the arms control gambit. The dominant non-status quo power, China views arms control as another meddlesome aspect of the global state system whose architecture, legitimacy, and norms it rejects.

For decades, top Chinese leaders ritually have denied any ambitions for global “Hegemony.” Now, in 2019 it is increasingly clear that China seeks to reshape global economics and politics to serve the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership, and that it is building a PLA which could soon have the means to impose the CCP’s will regionally, globally, and in Space. Given such ambitions it seems highly likely that CCP leaders long ago decided they must attain nuclear superiority.

But even before such a nuclear buildup, it is imperative to consider the possibility of offensive nuclear cooperation between Russia and China, inasmuch as they have held two publicly announced “strategic defense” exercises in 2016 and 2017. Russia and China may calculate that such a nuclear “tilt” against the United States could be used to dissuade and deter U.S. military support for Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, or multiple Russian targets in Europe. However, with missile platforms like the KZ-21 China would have the means to seek nuclear superiority over Russia in the 2030s and beyond.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/next-china-military-threat-worlds-biggest-mobile-icbm-40952

i'm all for a healthy M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) deterrent between all nuclear-attack capable countries on earth,
because in my view it is also *the* way to get superpowers safely accustomed to their overseas bases being "uncomfortably close to eachother sometimes", and i also believe the MAD principle of nuclear powers has and will prevent many proxy wars (from getting out of hand).

but it has to be a well-balanced arrangement, not one that sucks up money and ends up providing a false sense of security.

i'm going to leak something to Chinese intel here : i read how the Pentagon plans to counter hypersonic glide vehicles carrying nukes, and i bet the same strategy can also be used against entire ICBMS filled with nukes.

in simple terms, they plan to put kinetic ICBM / hypersonics kill munitions in orbit, which they think they can keep entirely kinetic, meaning non-explosive, and knock out ICBMs that way.

you superpowers need to realize a few things at all levels of your governments, and your political, business-world and military and intel communities :
- you have been clear about how you don't like the US to be the sole police power nation on the planet. about how you want a multi-polar world. i support this view. so does the current US administration.
- the math about nuclear weapons and anti-nuke defense weapons is simple : you need to build only as many anti-nukes as is needed to stop a small nuclear attack.
ofcourse, everyone's instinct is to find something that stops ICBMS and hypersonics, and then mass-produce that stuff. but that would mean the start of a scary, expensive, stress-full, nuclear arms race, to prevent the MAD principle from being obsoleted entirely.
and with several large nations extending their reach via the creation of their own overseas bases, we could really use a solid MAD principle to prevent any accidental confrontation of these superpowers' conventional forces from escalating into a very large war or even nuclear war (because that's what you risk if you let the strength of the MAD principle erode in an ICBM/hypersonics vs anti-nukes armsrace that is not controlled by verifiable treaties that put limits on both the numbers of nukes a country may field, and the number of anti-nukes.)
- you also need (again by treaty) verifiable limits on production capacity for nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles.
- you also need some form of easily updated treaty that governs things like automatic truces and diplomatic negotiations after exchanges of fire between conventional forces of any nations.

superpowers, emerging superpowers, emerging nuclear-capable countries, and large countries with ambitions to join the ranks of superpowers,
i can support your ambitions, and provide valuable insights that you might otherwise overlook due to your organisations culture.

all i ask is that you do not treat the smaller countries of this world as slaves or disposable assets.
treat us as the equals and allies that we are to you.

CIA/USA : i'm also keeping an eye on valuable finds hidden deep on this forum, and have started to create a playlist of them at

i fully agree that NATO has the right to say no to a global policing role, and i also agree that the EU side of NATO is obligated to prevent the Russians overrunning Europe in any way imaginable, to prevent resource-rich Russia from gaining control over tech-savvy EU.
And i believe the best way to achieve this is either to outsource our security to you Americans and actually pay up for the security you provide the EU,
or to actually set up more capable and slightly larger militaries of our own. The latter has my preference. It's a harsh world out there, and militaries are useful also in natural disasters and other serious problems.

 

[Arulmozhi Varman]

China has frozen its Nuclear weapons number at 294. So will they dismantling old stockpiles while making new ones for new missiles? So supposedly if this missile is going to be tested, and it can carry 50 warheads will it means less 50 missiles and warheads from other missiles?
Or will it be increasing it from 294? Lots of inconsistencies in the article.

 

[Dante80]

The article is all over the place. The KZ class of LVs are designed as rapid response launch vehicles, capable of replacing space assets shortly due to war attrition or accidents, or deploying said assets shortly due to theater specific needs. Their potential and effectiveness as ICBMs is both limited and uncalled for. It is like choosing to use a hydraulic hammer to nail a painting in your wall.