March 4, 2004 :: Analysis
A study prepared by the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) for the Defense Intelligence Agency outlines both China’s likely response and attitudes toward U.S. ballistic missile defense, and China’s own missile defense efforts and systems.
The study, dated September 2003, divides the treatment of China’s strategic position towards missile defenses into 5 periods, beginning in 1955 and ending with 2002.
The outline of Chinese strategic doctrine from that of the Mao years, when nuclear weapons were regarded as just another weapon, through China’s very reluctant acceptance of something like mutually assured destruction, shows a policy which has not followed the same track as that of the United States in its nuclear thinking. Unlike Russia and domestic left-wing opponents, for example, China apparently may have considered Reagan’s SDI as potentially stabilizing.
Most interesting, however, is the (admittedly little) light shed on China’s own ballistic missile programs, which around 1964, when Chairman Mao ordered a long term BMD research. According to various sources cited, the program included a team of 8-10 scientists, a cost of some $100 million dollars, is described as having paralleled U.S. and Soviet research during the period, until Deng Xiaping allegedly cancelled the program in 1983. Another source cited, however, claims that there was a Program 640 which set out to field a viable defense which included “a kinetic kill vehicle, a high powered laser, space early warning, and target discrimination system components.” The study also notes that Secretary McNamara apparently hinted at such Chinese BMD developments in 1966. There is also evidence that China was weighing both a land-based defense and a space based defense in the 1980s. The study notes the plausibility of Chinese missile defenses patterned after Soviet and (previous) American interceptors which were nuclear-tipped, but hastily steps back to say that there is no evidence for this “in the literature surveyed for this essay.”
The study describes an “acceleration and expansion of China’s own efforts to build a missile defense system” during the 1990s. In addition to some 100 or more SA-300 air and missile defense interceptors acquired from Russia, China apparently also began work on the “Patriot-like” HQ-9 interceptor, and another with an extended range based on America’s more advanced PAC-3. One factor pushing this acceleration was concern for the need to defend the Three Gorges Dam—where China is believed to have such missile defenses currently deployed.
(Article)
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