By Rick Fisher
February 11, 2023 Updated: February 15, 2023
A Long March 5B rocket
lifts off from the Wenchang launch site on China's southern Hainan island on
May 5, 2020. Another variant of the Long March rocket was used to get China's
hypersonic missile into orbit in July 2021. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)
Commentary
When China tested its fractional orbital
bombardment system (FOBS) nuclear delivery weapon in July 2021 and August 2021,
it said nothing about its plans for developing this weapon.
First produced by the
former Soviet Union in the late 1960s to better evade the U.S. early warning
radar, China’s FOBS can do that but could also evolve into a potent space
weapon.
Two recent Chinese
revelations may indicate that China intends to build a robust FOBS capability
that could include various liquid- and solid-fueled launchers, large and small
warhead dispensing “buses,” and exploitation of launch opportunities from
multiple axes on the globe.
Early in the U.S.–Soviet
intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) competition, the Soviets decided that
they needed to evade early U.S. and Canadian ballistic missile early warning
(BMEW) radar that, despite the curvature of the Earth over the Arctic, could
provide useful warning of Soviet ICBMs that could fly at altitudes of more than
1,000 miles over their ballistic arcs.
But in the mid to late
1960s, Soviet designers such as Sergei Korolev and Mikhail Yangel had developed
ICBMs that would place a warhead bus into low Earth orbit (125 to 300 miles),
but go the opposite direction and strike U.S. targets with southern approaches
not defended by BMEW radar. The bus would then use thrusters to decelerate to
allow strikes with nuclear warheads.
For its July 2021 and
August 2021 test flights, China used a 1980s vintage workhorse
satellite-lofting China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC)
Long March-2C space launch vehicle but equipped with a new final stage “bus”
that also circled the Earth on a South Polar trajectory over Antarctica.
It’s very likely that the
Chinese FOBS bus decelerated before launching a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV)
warhead at a target in China. HGVs are maneuverable and can exploit long and
low trajectories to “sneak up on” a target.
Older, reliable
liquid-fuel launchers such as the Long March-2C can loft warhead-dispensing
FOBS buses that can circle the Earth for months before a conflict. This gives
the Chinese regime the option of multi-axis, devastating nuclear first strikes
or surprise nonnuclear attacks against targets on land or at sea.
But Chinese rocket
companies such as CASC and the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation
(CASIC), in addition to new “private” space launch vehicle (SLV) companies,
offer great potential for developing more mobile solid-fuel FOBS platforms.
These range from the
massive CASIC solid fuel Kuaizhou-31, which can loft 70-ton payloads into
orbit, to the smaller CASC Jielong-3—based on the DF-41 ICBM—which can loft 1.5
tons to a 300-mile orbit.
The Jielong-3 has been used
to launch surveillance satellites of the new Hong Kong Aerospace Technology
Group (HKATG), which on Jan. 9 announced, with Djibouti’s President Ismail Omar
Guelleh, their initialing of a $1 billion deal to build a space launch facility
with up to seven space launch platforms by 2028. This would be China’s
first foreign-deployed space launch base.
But just to be sure the
world didn’t conclude that Djibouti would be allowing China to launch nuclear
weapons, on the very same day, the authoritarian Guelleh government signed the
U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Now China doesn’t adhere
to this treaty, and even as a “private” company, HKATG would have to obey
Chinese “civil-military fusion” regulations that would oblige it to follow
Chinese government and military orders.
As it has never before
conducted space launches, perhaps HKATG will rely heavily on help from the
People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force, which controls China’s five
other space launch bases and the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) manned and
unmanned space assets and is likely the lead PLA service for space
warfare—perhaps to include bombing the Earth from space.
Since 2017, China has
maintained naval and air facilities in Djibouti, stationing about 2,000 troops
there, armed with the potent ZTL-11 wheeled tank; the United States maintains
more than 4,000 troops nearby in Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.
It’s unlikely that
increasingly China-dependent Guelleh will raise a real fuss if Beijing wants to
launch “civilian” Jielong-3 SLVs that are covertly armed with a FOBS bus that
could carry at least one hypersonic glide vehicle weapon.
From Djibouti, a South
Polar trajectory over Antarctica sets up a FOBS bus for strikes against U.S.
bases in Alaska or U.S. ICBM bases in North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming.
That China’s FOBS buses
have the most accurate guidance information will now be better ensured by
Beijing’s second revelation, made in a Feb. 2 article in the Chinese
publication China Space News, that CASIC will build a space tracking and
control (STC) facility at China’s Zhongshan Research Station in Antarctica.
The United States,
Norway, and Germany also maintain STC facilities in Antarctica. Still, they
don’t have FOBS weapons as China does, and the CASIC STC in Antarctica is also
likely to be directly controlled by the Strategic Support Force (SSF).
China’s Zhongshan STC
likely won’t just be helping guide FOBS strikes against the United States; it’s
also ideally placed to support SSF-controlled expansion of China’s manned
presence on the moon.
The Zhongshan STC will
also help the SSF to conduct space warfare. In a Feb. 19, 2021, article,
Chinese state-run media outlet Xinhua reported that Chinese researchers had
installed a “fluorescence doppler lidar system” at Zhongshan for atmospheric
research; lidar is laser radar.
Many of the low Earth
orbit surveillance satellites of the United States, the UK, France, Japan, and
Taiwan are polar orbiters that pass over Antarctica multiple times per day.
There’s a good chance
that since 2021, China’s research lidar at Zhongshan has grown larger—into the
kind of laser weapon that the regime began using about 20 years ago to harass
and damage U.S. satellites.
As the ozone is much
thinner over Antarctica, a laser weapon based there will be able to do much
more damage to overhead satellites, which also tend to fly closer to the Earth
over the poles.
All of this points to the
necessity for the United States to consider the rapid development of its own
FOBS weapons to deter the Chinese regime, which, for decades, has rejected all
arms control approaches that would limit its nuclear weapons.
It also points to the
need for the United States to engage Australia and New Zealand to consider how
the ANZUS (Australia–New Zealand–United States) allies can better ensure that they
can stop Chinese military usage of Antarctica, either by non-kinetic or kinetic
means.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and
do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-builds-for-south-polar-nuclear-strikes_5050885.html
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