united states

Description

Orders for the Commander of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) to submit a report on means of nullifying China’s underground tunnel network were outlined in the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed by President Barack Obama on January 2.The NDAA-directed report will further seek to identify knowledge gaps regarding China’s nuclear weapons programs, a request which was likely spurred by a controversial 2011 study out of Georgetown University entitled “Strategic Implications of China’s Underground Great Wall.”The researchers claimed that China’s Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the country’s military tasked with protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads, had dug some 3,000 miles of tunnels which currently housed up to 3,000 nuclear warheads – ten times US intelligence estimates.The report drew a firestorm of criticism via its unconventional Internet-based research methods, which relied on Google Earth, blogs, military journals and even a fictional television program about Chinese artillery soldiers, to reach its conclusions.But the questionable conclusions of the Georgetown report and Washington’s drive to more properly assess China’s military capability, are more reflective of Washington’s own ‘nuclear strategy’ than Beijing’s ambitions, James Corbett, editor of the Japanese-based Corbett Report news website, argues.RT: The U.S.