from Sputnik News:
Wednesday marks the 60th anniversary of the day China officially joined the club of nuclear weapons powers. Six decades after the milestone, the Asian nation is working to upgrade its deterrent to account for new strategic threats. A leading Russian military observer tells Sputnik about the latest advances to the People’s Republic’s arsenal.
60 years ago today, on October 16, 1964, China carried out its first nuclear test. Taking place in Lop Nur, Xinjiang province, the test had a blast yield of 22 kilotons – comparable in power to the first American and Soviet nuclear explosions, firmly establishing the PRC’s status as a fledgling nuclear power.
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Beginning its nuclear research in the mid-1950s amid fierce tensions with the United States (including a shooting war with US forces in Korea between 1950-1953, during which US commander Douglas MacArthur asked the White House for clearance to use nuclear weapons, and a deadly escalation in the Taiwan Strait between September 1954 and May 1955), the Asian nation got a head start on its nuclear program thanks to Soviet help, and continued it independently after the Sino-Soviet split began to take shape in the late 1950s.
The Chinese nuclear test caught Washington off-guard, with US intelligence getting almost everything wrong – from Beijing’s ability to develop a bomb so quickly, to determining that the October 1964 test would involve the use of uranium-235, not plutonium.
Two years after 1964 test, China created its first nuclear missile – the medium-range Dongfeng-2 (lit. ‘East Wind-2’), and less than a year after that, the nation tested its first hydrogen bomb.
The People’s Republic chose not to chase after the US and the USSR in the superpowers’ race to amass tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, instead sticking to a small deterrent force comparable in numbers to the arsenals of France and Britain.
China is also one of only two nuclear powers with a no first use policy, which states that Beijing will not launch its nuclear weapons unless attacked using such arms first. India has a similar policy.
