Video Analysis: China’s Unquenchable Thirst for Nuclear Weapons

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

Kris Osborn, Warrior Maven President

Hello, and welcome to the Senate for military modernization warrior Maven, I’m Kris Osborn. We’re joined today by a leading expert in missile defense military strategy, Mr. Tim Morrison, who’s a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and also served as a Deputy Assistant to the President on national security and is a former Naval Intelligence Officer. So we’re glad to have his expertise. It’s something our viewers and readers are very welcome to hear. 

And my question to you today is, with all this attention on Ukraine, there’s likely still you mentioned this earlier, there is a need not to forget about China and their nuclear modernization, not long ago in an MDA conference. Sure enough, Admiral Richard, who’s in charge of Strategic Command, said that satellite photos were showing silos, ground silos being built within mainland China. 

They’re known for these road mobile ICBM launchers. But the notion that they’re expanding in the face of discussion about potential agreements to slow down proliferation, they are rapidly expanding their nuclear modernization with the number of warheads according to the Pentagon’s report, almost doubling or going up exponentially, you would know a lot about this. What’s your estimation of what threat looks like and why the Chinese are in such high gear to massively upscale their arsenal? 

Tim Morrison, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute

I think a lot of it, Chris goes back to Xi Jinping. Comparisons, you know, himself in Chairman Mao the kind of imprint he had on China. When I was in government, we got a lot of criticism from people outside for why we were talking about China and China’s nuclear weapons. 

And of course, you know, since we started emphasizing that in the Trump administration in around the 2019 timeframe, so much more has become known the hundreds of new Chinese ICBM silos, for example, the Department of Defense report last year, the 2021 report that talked about China possibly being up to 1000 nuclear weapons by, by the by the next decade. You know, we really, we saw this in the Trump administration.