Chinese Tunnels: And We’re Worried About Iran’s Nuclear Program?
This author is of the opinion that Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons. But those who believe otherwise might find themselves distracted by what students at Georgetown University are learning. At the Washington Post, William Wan reports:
Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.
The result of their effort? The largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps. … designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal [which, they're learning] could be many times larger than the well-established estimates of arms-control experts. … China’s nuclear warheads could number as many as 3,000.
The 3,000 warheads aside, what about the thousands of miles of tunnels, which Wan describes as the distance between Boston and San Francisco? One’s first impulse is to wonder why China would needs that many miles of tunnels to hide nuclear weapons. In fact, it sounds more like a shelter for its citizens to survive a nuclear second (retaliatory) strike after China launches a preemptive strike.
Presumably, though, the tunnels are used to transport nuclear weapons and missiles around the country without detection. Whatever its purpose, the tunnels constitute a massive domestic infrastructure project, the likes of which Americans can only dream of today.
Cross-posted from the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.
peace and love:
December 10th, 2011 at 11:59 pm
since the late 1950′s there has been a tunnel from White House thru caverns and under the South Mountain of MD and PA, thru Fredrick, MD ( Ft Detrick, Raven Rock Mt, and Camp David are visible exits of this series of tunnels, google eyeon series) the tunnel leads up Rt 116, Rt 74 and Rt 34 directly into the Carlise, PA Army War College. The CIA trains military intel officers there as part of Military Intell brigade for all services. There is a direct connection between Dickinson College Law School and the Government. In the 70′s, when I lived on a military base there, the CIA was accused in local papers of training Militar Intel officers in followint unsuspecting citizens in Middlesex Twp, in Cumberland County. These agents were trained to mingle with the anti war community to see if the local hippies knew that there were nuclear bombs stored on several military bases. Since some of the anti war community included members of the Plowshare Catonsville MD destruction of Draft records trial people, the federal govt, in coordination with the FBI and Cointel project followed many hippies. The govt was so concerned that the anti war movement was too strong that when Patty Hearst disappeared, the FBI looked in harrisburg and empaneled a grand jury to see if anyone in HBg was helping her. And we were !