U.S. students dig up China's nuclear secrets: Arsenal could be huge

A group of Georgetown University students has translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data and concluded that China's nuclear arsenal could be many times larger than experts believe.

Thursday, December 01, 2011

By William Wan

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — The Chinese have called it their "Underground Great Wall," a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country's increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.

For the past three years, a group of Georgetown University students has called it something else: homework.

Led by a hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.

The result: the largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the Chinese military in charge of protecting and deploying ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.

The study hasn't been released, but it has sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top Pentagon officials.

Most attention has focused on the study's provocative conclusion: China's nuclear arsenal could be many times larger than estimates of arms-control experts.

"It's not quite a bombshell, but those thoughts and estimates are being checked against what people think they know based on classified information," said a Defense Department strategist speaking on condition of anonymity.

Critics, however, have questioned the Internet-based research of the students, who drew from sources as disparate as Google Earth, blogs, military journals and a fictionalized TV docudrama about Chinese artillery soldiers — the rough equivalent of watching Fox TV's "24" for insights into U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

But the strongest condemnation has come from nonproliferation experts who worry the study could fuel arguments for maintaining nuclear weapons in an era when efforts are being made to reduce the world's post-Cold War stockpiles.

The project has made a profound mark on the students, including some who have graduated and taken research jobs with the Defense Department and Congress.

"I don't even want to know how many hours I spent on it," said Nick Yarosh, 22, an international-politics senior at Georgetown. "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."

The professor, Phillip Karber, 65, had spent the Cold War as a top strategist reporting directly to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But his early work in defense cemented his reputation, when he led an elite research team created by Henry Kissinger, then the national-security adviser, to investigate the weaknesses of Soviet forces.

Karber prided himself on recruiting the best analysts in government. "You didn't just want the highest-ranking or brightest guys, you wanted the ones who were hungry," he said.

In 2008, he was volunteering on a committee for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a Pentagon agency charged with countering weapons of mass destruction. After a devastating earthquake struck Sichuan province, the chairman of Karber's panel noticed Chinese news accounts reporting thousands of radiation technicians rushing to the region.

Find out what's going on, the chairman asked Karber, who began looking for analysts again — this time among his Georgetown students.

The students worked in their dorms translating military texts. They skipped movie nights for marathon sessions reviewing TV clips of missiles being moved from one tunnel structure to another. While friends read Shakespeare, they gathered in the library to war-game worst-case scenarios of a Chinese nuclear strike on the United States.

The team grew from a handful of contributors to roughly two dozen. Most spent their time studying the subterranean activities of the Second Artillery Corps.

While the tunnels' existence was an open secret among the handful of experts, almost no papers or public reports on the structures existed.

So the students turned to publicly available Chinese sources: military journals, news reports and online photos posted by citizens. China's famously secretive military also was beginning to release more information, driven by its leaders' eagerness to show off the nation's growing power to its citizens.

The Internet also generated a raft of leads: new military forums, blogs and once-obscure local TV reports. Strategic string searches allowed the students to penetrate some military websites and download documents such as syllabuses taught at China's military academies.

The main problem was the amount of translation required.

The team assembled a makeshift system to scan images of books and documents. Using text-capture software, they converted those pictures into Chinese characters, which were fed into translation software. From those crude English versions, they highlighted key passages for finer translation by Chinese speakers.

The downside was the drudgery: hours feeding pages into the scanner. The upside: The students in three years compiled a searchable database of more than 1.4 million words on the Second Artillery and its tunnels.

By combining everything, they were able to triangulate the location of several structures, with a rough idea of what types of missiles were stored in each.

The work also yielded smaller revelations: how missiles were kept mobile and transported between structures, and tantalizing images and accounts of a "missile train" and disguised passenger rail cars to move China's long-range missiles.

Some of the biggest breakthroughs came after members of Karber's team used personal connections in China to obtain a 400-page manual produced by the Second Artillery and usually available only to military personnel.

Another source of insight: a pair of semi-fictionalized TV series chronicling the lives of Second Artillery soldiers. The shows included surprisingly accurate depictions of artillery units' procedures that lined up with the military manual and other documents.

"Until someone showed us on screen how exactly these missile deployments were done from the tunnels, we only had disparate pieces," Karber said. "The TV shows gave us the big picture of how it all worked together."

In December 2009, just as the students began making progress, the Chinese military admitted for the first time that the Second Artillery had been building a network of tunnels. According to a report by state-run CCTV, China had more than 3,000 miles of tunnels, including deep underground bases that could withstand multiple nuclear attacks.

The news shocked Karber and his team. It confirmed the direction of their research, but it also highlighted how little attention the tunnels were garnering outside East Asia.

The lack of interest, particularly in the U.S. media, demonstrated China's unique position in the world of nuclear arms. For decades, the focus has been on the two powers with the largest nuclear stockpiles: the United States, with 5,000 warheads available for deployment, and Russia, which has 8,000.

But of the five nuclear-weapons states recognized by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, China has been the most secretive. While the United States and Russia are bound by bilateral treaties that require on-site inspections, disclosure of forces and bans on certain missiles, China is not.

The assumption for years has been that the Chinese arsenal is relatively small: 80 to 400 warheads.

Based on the number of tunnels the Second Artillery is digging and its increasing deployment of missiles, Karber argues, China's nuclear warheads could number as many as 3,000.

That assertion has provoked heated responses.

Gregory Kulacki, a China nuclear analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the 3,000 figure "ridiculous" and said the study's methodology — especially its inclusion of posts from Chinese bloggers — was "incompetent and lazy."

"The fact that they're building tunnels could actually reinforce the exact opposite point," he argued. "With more tunnels and a better chance of survivability, they may think they don't need as many warheads to strike back."