Stolen technology aside, there are no comments on reactor safety. The Chinese, and the Russians as well, still have to build a naval nuclear reactor that is safe to operate at sea. The Soviet/Russian Navy had its share of accidents, and one of the Xia-Class boats, the Type 94′s predecessor, sank after an accident that some analyst relate to a reactor failure.

The new design may be seaworthy, but it is hard to tell whether the reactor is safe enough to operate. Soviet submarines’ reactors had less (if any) shielding than their American counterparts, and early designs lacked backup cooling systems, which not only caused bad accidents but also cancer to their crews. Are Chinese nuclear power plants in the same league? Probably. The Chinese still have to master some technologies, including nuclear safety.

Before the Type 94 becomes a real threat, it would be good to know if it is both seaworthy and nuclear safe.

My two cents.

Reply: Good currency questions. You write that “one of the Xia-Class boats, the Type 94′s predecessor, sank after an accident that some analyst relate to a reactor failure.” I have heard that rumor too but been reluctant to include it in my estimates because of lack of credible sources. What are your sources for this? HK

You do realize that China’s nuclear arsenal is on a par with that of Britain, China, France, Israel and Pakistan — 250 to 300 warheads, give or take spares, seems to be the level generally agreed by professional soldiers to ensure deterrence and a bit of extra clout at the bargaining table. Only the USA and CIS seem to be caught in a “MAD” dynamic.

Over most of its millennia of history, China has ever been a regional power and a commerce-driven one at that. It remains so. It was the threats of generals Lemay and MacArthur to drop nuclear weapons on China that traumatized Beijing into developing an arsenal of its own.

Moreover, a lot of people outside the USA find it is grotesque for a nation to consume 25% of the world’s resources and buy 47% of its arms each year while weighing in at only 5% of world population.

It also becomes tiresome to read over and over how America is under attack, attack, attack. Yes, there was 9/11. But as a Colombian friend put it, “Yes, we are sorry for the victims, but 3,000 people and two buildings? We’ve been living like that for 20 years.”

Perhaps the best way to avoid coming under attack is to shut down some 761 overseas military installations: folks everywhere hate gatecrashers.

Perhaps it is also about taking a detailed look at other peoples. Islam has never ever been a unified faith. It is as diversified as Christianity and Judaism. Not only is bin Laden not its big-brother-in-chief, but it doesn’t even have a structured equivalent of the Vatican: it’s a decentralized religion. Muslims have been tearing out their hair since the 7th century over their inability to unify.

As for China, it has 56 official languages. Beyond that, the shift into a market economy that began over 20 years ago means that business has an increasing say in government policy and autocracy is a myth anyhow. Recovery of Hong Kong and Macau about a decade ago has injected additional influences into the Beijing game.

As for hostage-taking by China and Russia, international relations are more like the evolving ballet of two wrestlers adjusting and readjusting their holds on each other. Although strategic obliteration of entire peoples is back in fashion, the name of the game in Beijing and Moscow in international and domestic relations is the identification of win/win arrangements rather than boring unconditional surrenders.

Not everybody thinks alike.

On who is paying for whose SSBNs and such, you could also argue that the USD 538 billion of the USD 1.3 trillion in China’s foreign currency reserves is mostly invested in US Treasury securities actually amounts to a loan that covers the entire DoD annual budget.

And as the Chinese yuan revalues, the interest on those securities vanishes into thin air.

All I need do is ask, “How you expect America to get its oil across two oceans, if an almost certain, future conventional oil war breaks out, over known resource declines of said oil?” And, if one plays out the strategic logistics of an extended conventional oil war, just look at the eco-geo-political-military regional consequences: Three basic autocracies, Russia, China and Islam, and more than likely, a capitulation of India and Europe, to the Chinese side, in any real global conventional conflict, as nuclear must be ruled out as MAD, and I don‘t really believe anyone is going to be that stupid… Yet, believe me, It’s approaching fast, and America better awaken, the logistics I speak of are a real possibility. Further, do it by population scenarios of eco-geo-political-militarism, and one quickly sees why any Mid-East oil war, would force India and Europe to capitulate. We all know, in the back of our minds, who will be the true land-powers, in any such scenario. China and Russia could hold Mid-East oil hostage to India and Europe, joining them, by the shear forces of economic and food starvation tactics. In any extended conventional naval battle, America would surely lose, as all these land locked autocratic empires need do, is sink our oil tankers, with any number of conventional means, and remember, one of China’s diesel-electric-battery subs surfaced, right in the middle of our Pacific Ocean carrier, etc., exercises, just last year, without detection…A major embarrassment to the big wigs.

We’d better start studying these scenarios a bit deeper, and fast make America energy independent, as at the moment, we have a very insecure national defense policy and actual potential. In just a few years, we’ll have a naked national security defense potential. This is serious…!!!

Reply: Whoa, how do you sleep at night? A highly worst-case – almost doomsday – analysis. Granted, U.S. energy policy certainly is in need of a major overhaul – once again, and China is getting richer and modernizing its military. But I think your “us and them” methodology makes use of a few observations (some incorrect or incomplete) to conclude a lot while ignoring (or missing) other factors.

For example, while you’re correct to point out the vulnerability of the US dependency on foreign oil – although it is by no means entirely dependent on foreign oil, you miss that China appears to be make a similar mistake.

Reply: It is a common misunderstanding that Google Earth reveals military secrets. But the images on Google Earth do not reveal anything that is not already known to China’s potential adversaries. Both the United States and Russia have monitored the Chinese sites for decades with their own spy satellites, which have resolutions that are much higher than the images you can find on Google Earth. And the images on Google Earth are not updated very often and so are not very useful for keeping track of new developments. But China itself also buys commercial satellite images to study other countries’ facilities. The only thing Google Earth changes is that it allows the public – those of us without access to classified spy satellite images – to “discover” a bit of what the intelligence community has been looking at for years. Google Earth enables public scrutiny and government accountability, the very basis for democratic societies. HK

At an estimate, would it be prohibitively difficult to expand the Jianggezhuang base to fit the Jin class, or more than one Jin? Also what kind of practical defense does such a base offer beyond concealing whatever is inside it?

At an estimate of submarine construction, how long would it take for all five Jin class to be constructed, then as an estimate of Google Earth Intel gathering how long before they were spotted and (relatively) confirmed?

I’d not be concerned with a direct confrontation between the U.S. and China, they’re not stupid and neither are we. Even if we assume for the sake of the argument that they have the capacity to rival or stalemate the U.S. they’d suffer at least as much damage, most likely more in terms of percentage of population.

What worries me is the kind of treaty entanglements that ultimately started the first world war. If China were to lay claim to Taiwan or other territories, forcefully, who would that drag in to the conflict, and would the U.S. be under obligation to become involved from the immediate targets of the Chinese, or allies of the contested regions? With N.Korea and India packing new nuclear armaments and being neighbors to China, are those neighbors more likely to be the targets of the new Jin, and/or a renewed SSBN program?

Okay, okay, I’ve got more than a few questions….

Reply: Questions are good…. The Jin might already fit in the Jianggezhuang sub cave. The entrance seems wide enough, although it might get narrower further in. We just don’t know. But the Chinese government apparently has decided that it needs a SSBN base with both the Northern and Southern fleets. That said, just because the Jin class has been photographed on Hainan Island doesn’t prove that it will also be based there. But it is a reasonable guess.

The protection offered by a submarine cave is probably considerable against most conventional weapons, although the U.S. military is certainty trying to develop penetrators that can dig through several meters of rock. But why waste the effort trying to go through the rock when all you have to do is blast the entrance? That will effectively trap (and possibly also damage) anything inside.

Concerning the production speed of the Jin SSBNs, the first was launched in 2004, first detected by commercial satellites in 2007, and two more later that year. So China might have launched three by now. But launched doesn’t mean operational, and the oldest Jin is not yet operational. China had significant difficulties bringing the Xia up to operational status, so we’ll have to see when the first reaches operational status. DOD seem to believe in 2009-2010, but they have been wrong before.

As for the risk of direct confrontation, it’s not so much the deliberate and calculated scenarios that worry me as the possibility that posturing and plans can drag us into a clash that might escalate to nuclear use. The Jin class is not an intercontinental weapon because it’s missiles can’t reach the continental United States unless it sails far into the Pacific. Such a deployment would probably be suicide. Instead, I think the Jin mission is regional; targeting Russia, India and U.S. bases in the region. North Korea is not believed to be a target for Chinese nuclear weapons.

But operationally, China’s SSBN fleet is starting from scratch; they have no operational experience and poor command and control capabilities. Unless they develop that, the Jin program is really a waste of money. HK

Well, um the USN budget for FY2007 was US$ 127.3 billion and that year China had directly purchased US Treasury securities worth US$ 416.0 billion in February and US$ 477.6 by December, so you can also argue that China is *financing* the cost of the five or six Trident-firing submarines that target it: it’s a complicated world.

I’ve been living in China for five years now. The government has its hands full steering an economy of 1.3 billion and military conquest is simply not the mindset here. This is a culture of intensive social networking based on building win/win relationships because that is what millennia of drought, flood and famine has taught them. It has hardwired into their worldview that when the chips are down, family and friends are all you can really count on to survive. This is one reason why divorce is still rare here.

The PLA is bigger than the US armed forces? The old rule of thumb is that the invader needs 4:1 superiority for assured conventional victory. How would China ship six million men to California? Stealth kayaks across the Bering Straits?

International law says China would also have to assume the occupied country’s liabilities. Does anyone seriously imagine they want to take over the USA for the privilege of paying off US$ 10 trillion of debt? And that’s just Federal debt.

What are folks afraid of? That they’ll invade your home, make your capitalist job so you can turn your lawn into a rice paddy and then your wife would have to learn how to cook real food for a change?

Do you really think they want to figure out how to deal with all the gun nuts running around? Armed forces and government agencies apart, the USA has 81 guns per 100 inhabitants against 3 per 100 here. Poor Chinese! They wouldn’t know where to begin.

And secrecy? After 30 years of life in France and Sweden, plus 16 in New York, the Chinese are the most gossipy of the lot. If you’ve ever read Dante’s Inferno and all the different hells it describes, each with a special form of suffering custom-tailored to a sinner’s particular sin, well, he left out the worst suffering of all: eternal damnation to a post in Chinese Counterintelligence.

Finally, I realize this is sensitive but to think clearly about the future, you have to start by taking a clear look at the past, so please accept that my intention is constructive: it’s strange to hear claims of US military victory in Vietnam. The US lost a war of attrition. Wars of attrition are nothing new to military history. It cost the Vietnamese pennies to fix a 7.62mm bullet atop an iron nail and cover it with plank so that it would go off under a soldier’s foot. How much did it cost to fly him out in a Chinook? Or to build, operate and staff the hospital that had to treat him? And then to train, transfer in and pay his replacement in his unit? It was classic attrition strategy through cost effectiveness.

Have a nice day.

[...]

My take on the whole Chinese sub situation would be that it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it turned out that they occasionally and purposefully display obsolete weapons technology as a distraction so as to propagate the impression to the rest of the world that they are “behind the times” and making little to no progress, but in reality they end up having the best weapons tech on the planet.

[...]

Yes, I will agree that the US has a lead in practical experience and Naval history, but where there is sufficient brain power and a sufficient desire to create something then it’s inevitable to do so. I guess what I’m trying to say is that when I hear people say the Chinese are “decades behind”, I don’t buy that at all. To me it’s the same as problems I deal with at work…if you want something done quick you just throw a bunch of money at it. So equate money with intelligence and desire and the time factor evaporates.

[shortened, ed.]

As for the new SSBN being a threat, we had the technology and capability to follow and destroy any undersea threat back in the 70′s, & our detection HW & SW has gotten better since then. The previous poster is correct, a proximity blast will destroy an undersea target by breaching the hull with concussion waves. It will also kill a lot of marine animals as well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

To HK; as a former sonarman, there is a lot that can be done to affect subsurface targets without a nuke blast.
The tension levels for our service people will be much higher if we go into another arms race, so let’s hope this doesn’t signal that. For all of us.