H-6 at the Zhuhai Air Show (2008)
Dongfeng 5 ICBM
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was not a direct participant in the Cold War, but its nuclear forces became an increasingly important factor in both Soviet and US calculations of the strategic balance. As in France and the UK, the government of the PRC which took power in 1949 quickly decided that a nuclear armoury would be essential if the country was to achieve the world status it deserved. The correctness of this decision was supported in Chinese eyes by the various crises involving the PRC and the USA in which the latter, either implicitly or, in some cases, explicitly, threatened the use of nuclear weapons against the PRC.
The Chinese programme appears to have started in 1955, and during the following five years Soviet scientists and military officers played a major role in helping the PRC to establish a nuclear research, development and production infrastructure. This massive help – unprecedented between a nuclear and a non-nuclear power – ceased abruptly with the political rift between the two countries in 1960, which set the Chinese programme back several years. Even so, the first atomic-bomb test took place on 16 October 1964, when a 22 kT device was exploded, followed by a second in May 1965 and a third in May 1966, while in October 1966 a missile was launched carrying a nuclear warhead which successfully detonated on arrival at the Lop Nor test site. The first H-bomb was successfully tested in June 1967, less than three years after the first atomic-bomb test – a considerably shorter gap than has been achieved by any other country.
Despite the Soviet help in the 1950s, the PRC’s rapid ascent to the status of a nuclear power was a truly remarkable achievement. It must be remembered that at the time of the Communist takeover in 1949 China was, in industrial terms, a very backward country, with very little modern infrastructure, and most of the little that did exist had been damaged in either the Second World War or the Civil War. On top of that, there were no established aircraft-construction or shipbuilding industries, no electronics industry, and only a limited weapons industry. Almost everything, therefore, had to be created from nothing.
Bombers
The only aircraft with a strategic capability to enter service with the Chinese air force was the Hong 6, a licence-produced version of the Soviet Tupolev Tu-16 Badger. An elderly twin-jet design, it could carry a single nuclear weapon to a range of some 3,000 km. Some 120 were produced and, at least at the end of the Cold War, there were no known plans to produce a successor.
Land-Based Missiles
The Soviet Union supplied the PRC with two SS-1 missiles in 1956. These were direct copies of the German A-4, and were followed by fourteen of the improved SS-2 missile between 1957 and 1960. The latter was placed in production as the Dong Feng 1 (DF-1; ‘Dong Feng’ means ‘East Wind’) and carried a high-explosive warhead; it was primitive, but it gave the People’s Liberation Army experience of working with missiles. Meanwhile, a serious domestic research-and-development programme had been set in train, with the intention of producing a family of land-based missiles for use against US targets. The DF-2 was the first and was based on the Soviet SS-3, ‘Shyster’. The missile was road-mobile and was launched from an erector–launcher, although its liquid fuel required a long and hazardous preparation time.
Next came the DF-3, which was much larger, but still road-mobile, although the use of storable liquid propellant resulted in a much reduced preparation time. Deployment peaked at some 120 in the early 1980s but reduced to approximately seventy by the late 1980s. The DF-3 carried a 3 MT thermonuclear warhead and had a range of 2,650 km, enabling it to threaten the US bases then located in the Philippines. A number of DF-3s, reported to be thirty-six, were exported to Saudi Arabia, although it is claimed that these were armed with high-explosive and not nuclear warheads.
The series continued with DF-4, in which a DF-3 first stage was mated to a new second stage; fuel was again storable liquid. With a range of 4,500 km, the DF-4 could attack the US facilities on Guam with a 3 MT warhead, and some fifteen to twenty were deployed. The final missile in this series was the DF-5, which in its DF-5A version delivered a 5 MT warhead over a 13,000 km range.
The PRC has used a wide variety of basing methods for its ICBMs. Both the DF-2 and the DF-3 were road-mobile, but their successor, the DF-4, was originally planned to be silo-based, although once the vulnerability of such a scheme had been appreciated alternative basing methods were sought. A rail-mobile scheme was considered and tested in 1975, but it was finally decided to install part of the DF-4 force in silos and part in caves. The silos are similar those used by the first-generation US ICBMs, with the missiles sitting in the silos atop large elevators which raise them to the surface for fuelling, final preparation and launch (as with the US Atlas missiles in the 1960s). The remaining missiles are mounted on mobile erectors located inside modified caves with blast-proof doors; the missiles would be brought out and erected before launching.
A range of further possibilities was considered for the DF-5s, including rail-mobility and imaginative schemes such as false bridge towers, narrow gorges, mock civilian houses and even barges on the Yangtze river. In the end it was decided to base them in hardened underground silos among a large number of dummy silos.
The effectiveness of the Chinese basing policy was endorsed by the US Joint Chiefs-of-Staff, who stated that:
China views its strategic missile force as an effective nuclear deterrent because its deployment strategy of mobility, hardening, and concealment poses targeting problems for any potential aggressor. This strategy enhances the survivability of some portion of the missile force for a significant retaliatory strike.
Indeed, even after the end of the Cold War it was generally admitted that not even US or Soviet satellites had been able to identify anything approaching all the Chinese missile sites; thus China had achieved what neither the USA nor the USSR had ever been able to do.
Submarines
Just before their split, the Soviet Union supplied the PRC with the plans and components for a Golf-class, diesel-electric-powered, ballistic-missile submarine, which was completed at Lüda in 1964. This was originally fitted with three vertical launch tubes in the sail, as in the Soviet original, but in 1974 it was modified by removing all three launch tubes and replacing them with two of greater diameter to enable it to test Chinese SLBMs.
The submarine element of the force was the Daqingyu-class SSBN, one of which was launched in 1981 and completed in 1987. This was powered by a single pressurized-water nuclear reactor and was armed with twelve Ju Lang 1 SLBMs.
The Ju Lang 1 (‘Ju Lang’ means ‘Great Wave’), like the US navy’s Polaris, used solid fuel, rather than the liquid fuel of the land-based ICBMs. The first launch was from a submerged barge in April 1982, followed by a launch from the Golf-class trials submarine on 12 October 1982 and from a Daqingyu-class SSBN in 1988. The missile carried a single 250 kT warhead to a range of 1,700 km, and by the end of the Cold War it served in one twelve-missile SSBN.
Targeting
The PRC’s initial intention was to target US military facilities in the Far East and, eventually, the USA itself. Thus the DF-2 was intended for US facilities in Japan, the DF-3 for US bases at Subic Bay and Clark Field in the Philippines, the DF-4 for the airbase on Guam Island, and the DF-5 for Hawaii and the west coast of the continental USA. With the deterioration of the relationship with the USSR and, in particular, the border clashes in 1969, the PRC completely reoriented its strategic force to target the Soviet Union – the only example of such a move during the entire Cold War. Thus the DF-2 and the DF-3 were retargeted against Soviet cities in the Far East and Central Asia, while the DF-4 brought Moscow and the large cities and military–industrial facilities in the Urals and Siberia within range. The DF-5, however, could reach any target in the Soviet Union and western Europe.
One of the unusual aspects of the Chinese nuclear forces is that they have been fielded in remarkably small numbers: the maximum numbers of land-based missiles to be deployed, for example, were 120 DF-3s, twenty DF-4s and four DF-5s. The capacity undoubtedly existed to produce and deploy many more, but the Chinese leadership appears to have taken the view that its strategic needs would be adequately met by possessing a nuclear force capable of delivering an effective retaliatory strike if attacked by nuclear weapons – i.e. an assured and effective second-strike capability against population and military–industrial centres.
