Quote:
Originally Posted by Officer of Engineers
Ok, this is important when gaging nuclear arsenals.
The DF-31 was told to Col Larry Wortzel by Chinese officials as being deployed in Henan. The only known 2AC unit there is the 80304 and US intel did not detect any new replacements of its older DF-5s.
What's more important is that we should give big leeway in stating about North Korean, Indian, Pakistani, and even Israeli nukes. The Chinese took over 15 years to fit a nuke onto a missile. Its earlier DF-2s aimed at Moscow was a bluff and was only armed with conventional HE. If the Chinese had obtain W-10 info, then, they still had failed to miniturized a MIRV warhead onto their missiles. The possiblity of the Israelis, Pakistanis, Indians, and North Koreans succeeding without nuke tests where the Chinese had failed with nuke tests are miniscue.
|
What specifically is the difficulty with the Dong Feng 31 that is slowing it down?
Is it not a Chinese copy of the Russian SS-25 small ICBM?
Is it the motor, the warhead or something else that is slowing deployment? Or just politics?
Are the Chinese not concerned with the possibility that the US bomber force, particularly the B-2 and B-1s could destroy most of their ICBM fleet with conventional weapons right now? With the expansion of the US ABM batteries, even it it requires 3 rounds for the ABM system to get one kill, they cant afford to lose many missiles in their holes and still maintain credability. They really need to get the DF-31 in the field...
Isnt the prolonged development itself a drawback to a credable defense?
If there is a DF-31 brigade. Do they have working missiles to fire from those launchers? And how many launchers is a brigade? And how many are still decoys and/or photoshop and how many are real?