WASHINGTON: China has more than 500 operational nuclear warheads in its arsenal and will probably have over 1,000 warheads by 2030, the Pentagon said in its annual report on Beijing’s military that was released on Thursday.
Despite the growing number of China’s nuclear weapons, they are still much lower than what Russia and the United States have.
The US has a stockpile of about 3,700 nuclear warheads, of which roughly 1,419 strategic nuclear warheads were deployed. Russia has about 1,550 nuclear weapons deployed and according to the Federation of American Scientists, a stockpile of 4,489 nuclear warheads.
In the report, the Pentagon said China’s more than 500 warheads as of May 2023 were on track to exceed projections.
In a previous report, the Pentagon estimated that Beijing had more than 400 operational nuclear warheads in 2021.
“We see the PRC (People’s Republic of China) continuing to quite rapidly modernise and diversify and expand its nuclear forces,” a senior US official told reporters during a briefing on the report. “What they’re doing now if you compare it to what they were doing about a decade ago, it really far exceeds that in terms of scale and complexity,” the official said.