The Chinese navy has tested a new submarine-launched ballistic missile, one that could eventually allow Chinese ballistic-missile boats, or “boomers,” to threaten the continental United States from waters that are close to China’s shores, and thus safer for the boomers.
The People’s Liberation Army Navy tested the JL-3 missile on Nov. 24, 2018, The Diplomat reported, citing unnamed U.S. government sources.
“Modernization of China’s submarine force remains a high priority for the PLAN,” the U.S. Defense Department explained in its 2018 report on Chinese military capabilities. The force is on track to achieve parity with America’s own fleet of undersea missile boats.
The Chinese test reportedly took place in the Bohai Sea, the innermost gulf of the Yellow Sea in the Western Pacific. According to The Diplomat, the test focused on the missile’s “cold-launch” capability. In other words, its ability to boost from the submerged launching vessel and out of the water before igniting its rocket booster.
The JL-3 represents an improvement over the JL-2 SLBMs that arm the Chinese navy’s current Type 094 boomers and an even greater improvement over the JL-1, China’s first submarine-launched nuclear weapon, pictured at top. The JL-1 possessed just enough range — a thousand miles or so — to threaten countries close to China.
The single Type 092 boat that carried the JL-1 never completed a front-line deployment after entering service in 1987. “It was reportedly too noisy and might have had other safety and reliability issues,” Tong Zhao, a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, based at the Carnegie–Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing, explained in a 2018 study
The Type 094s, by contrast, have been a relative success in service. In 2015, the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence described the type’s imminent first front-line deployment “perhaps the most anticipated development in China’s submarine force.”
