Washington: China is hiding its ballistic
missiles and nuclear warheads in a vast network of tunnels, said a media
report citing a study carried out by a professor and his students.
The
research was carried out over three years by Georgetown University
students who translated hundreds of documents, went through satellite
imagery, got Chinese military documents and trawled through hundreds of
gigabytes of online data, reported the
Washington Post.
They were led by Phillip A. Karber, a professor.
Their
effort has led to a large body of public knowledge about thousands of
miles of tunnels that were dug by Chinese military's Second Artillery
Corps, which protects and deploys ballistic missiles and nuclear
warheads.
The 363-page study
concludes that China's nuclear arsenal could be many times larger than
the estimates of arms-control experts, the media report said.
"It's
not quite a bombshell, but those thoughts and estimates are being
checked against what people think they know based on classified
information," a US Defense Department strategist was quoted as saying.
There
has been criticism over the study in which students carried out
internet-based research and drew from sources like Google Earth, blogs,
and military journals.
They also referred to a fictionalized TV docudrama about Chinese artillery soldiers.
Nick Yarosh, 22, a student who worked on the project, said: "I don't even want to know how many hours I spent on it."
"But
you ask people what they did in college, most just say I took this
class, I was in this club. I can say I spent it reading Chinese nuclear
strategy and Second Artillery manuals. For a nerd like me, that really
means something."
The study came about after Karber volunteered in 2008 on a Pentagon agency charged with countering weapons of mass destruction.
Karber's
committee noticed that following an earthquake in China's Sichuan
province, Chinese news accounts reported that thousands of radiation
technicians were rushing to the region.
It was followed by
pictures of strangely collapsed hills and speculation that the caved-in
tunnels in the area had held nuclear weapons, the
Washington Post said.
Karber
and his students were left stunned when in December 2009, the Chinese
military admitted for the first time that the Second Artillery had
indeed been building a network of tunnels. It confirmed the direction of
their research.
At the end of the study, Karber observed that
based on the number of tunnels the Second Artillery is digging and its
increasing deployment of missiles, China's nuclear warheads could number
as many as 3,000.
/gnartron
