Beijing Blasts Pentagon Report on China's Nuclear Arsenal as 'Full of Prejudice'

In a statement on Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that "the report released by the US Department of Defense, like previous similar reports, ignores facts " pertaining to China's military, Sputnik reported.

He added that the White House was using the report to "hype up talk of the China nuclear threat", slamming the US as the "world's largest source of nuclear threat".

The statement comes after the Pentagon on Wednesday released its annual report on military and security developments, in which the US Department of Defense specifically argued that China has expanded its nuclear arsenal much quicker than anticipated.

The report asserted, among other things, that China "is investing in, and expanding the number of its land-, sea-, and air-based nuclear delivery platforms and constructing the infrastructure necessary to support this major expansion of its nuclear forces", and that Beijing is also building a "nuclear triad".

According to the report, the ever-increasing pace of China's nuclear expansion may allow Beijing to possess up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads by 2027 and 1,000 warheads by 2030, 2.5 times more than estimated a year ago.

At present, China only maintains a small collection of between 200-350 nuclear warheads sufficient to deter an attack, and has implemented a no-first-use policy to further clarify that the weapons are purely defensive.

As for the Pentagon's report, it separately noted that the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) introduced a new version of its Xi'an H-6 bomber, the H-6N in October 2019, with the latter providing "a platform for the air component of the PRC (People's Republic of China)'s nascent nuclear triad".

Commenting on the report, an unnamed US defense official said that China's alleged expansion of its nuclear arsenal "is very concerning to us (the Pentagon)", the news network Al Jazeera reported.

The official argued that the document "raises questions about their (China's) intentions", urging more transparency from Beijing about the development of Chinese nuclear forces.

The state-run Chinese tabloid Global Times has, meanwhile, hit back at the report, noting that "no one knows the accuracy of the figures tossed out by the Pentagon".

"Since China's nuclear arsenal is one of the top state secrets, any description of China's nuclear power building by Washington is speculative", the news outlet underlined.

The Global Times insisted that "whatever Washington says about China's nuclear arsenal, we can just snub them". The tabloid called on Beijing to "dynamically maintain the nuclear power needed for ensuring our national security and ensuring the credibility of our nuclear deterrence to provide solid support for national security".