China seeks to join the nuclear big league
The Pentagon warns that China is fast building up its nukes, as well as its conventional forces, to confront America
WHEN AMERICA and the Soviet Union raced each other to build ever-larger nuclear arsenals during the cold war, China ambled disdainfully. It did not detonate its first nuclear weapon until 1964, kept only a few hundred warheads compared with the tens of thousands piled up by the superpowers, and to this day maintains it will never be the first to use nukes in a war. Now China is sprinting to catch up.
This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “An unpacific contest”
From the November 6th 2021 edition
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