Beijing: China today denounced a US Department of Defense (DOD) report on “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China” that was released on November 3, 2021. The DOD had claimed that the report provides a baseline assessment of the Department’s top pacing challenge and charts the maturation of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and outlines the strategic objectives driving the PLA’s defense policy and military strategy. It also covers key developments of the PLA’s military modernization and reform, and provides insights into the PRC’s regional and global ambitions.
“This includes the PLA developing the capabilities to conduct joint long-range precision strikes across domains, increasingly sophisticated space, counterspace, and cyber capabilities, and accelerating the large-scale expansion of its nuclear forces,” it had stated.
China today rubbished the report saying that just like similar reports in the past, it disregards facts and is filled with bias.
“The US is using this report to hype up the “China nuclear threat” theory. The international community has long seen through this trick of manipulating rhetoric in an attempt to confuse public opinion,” Chinese foreign office spokesperson Wang Wenbin told reporters here today.
China further retaliated saiying that “as a matter of fact, the top source of nuclear threat in the world is no other but the US itself”.
Wenbin cited statistics of “relevant international think tanks”, to point out that by the beginning of 2021, the US actually owned 5,550 nuclear warheads. “Despite possessing the world’s largest and most advanced nuclear arsenal, the US is still investing trillions of dollars to upgrade its “nuclear triad”, developing low-yield nuclear weapons, and lowering the threshold for using nuclear weapons,” he claimed. In addition, he said, the US has withdrawn from legal instruments in arms control such as the Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, kept advancing the deployment of anti-missile systems around the world, resumed research and development and tests of intermediate-range land-based missiles and sought to deploy them in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, and formed a small clique with strong Cold War undertones through the AUKUS nuclear submarine cooperation.
“These US moves gravely undermine global strategic stability and international peace and security,” he claimed.
China urged the US to earnestly assume its special and primary responsibilities towards nuclear disarmament, and drastically and substantively reduce its nuclear stockpile in a verifiable, irreversible and legally-binding manner to uphold global strategic equilibrium and stability.
“I want to stress that China remains firmly to a nuclear strategy of self-defense, actively advocates the ultimate complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons, and keeps its nuclear force at the minimum level required for national security,” Wenbin said.
China has maitained that it abides by the policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons at any time and under any circumstances and undertakes unequivocally not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states or nuclear-weapon-free zones unconditionally. No country will be threatened by China’s nuclear weapons so long as it does not use nuclear weapons against China, Wenbin said.
– global bihari bureau
