In case you were wondering, as I’ve been, as to what recently compelled the U.S. to renege on an international accord impelling signatory states to dismantle their weapons of mass destruction by the end of April 2010, Georgetown researcher Phillip A. Karber may have an unsurprising answer: China.Karber, who spent the Cold War years as a top strategist to both the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has for the past three years led a small but dedicated cadre of students in mapping what the Chinese have dubbed their “Underground Great Wall.” Karber’s new report, according to the Washington Post, offers the “largest body of public knowledge” about the unseen thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, China’s secret military branch tasked with “protecting and deploying” its arsenal of ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.The crowdsourcing efforts – translating hundreds of documents, combing through satellite images, getting their hands on classified documents from the Chinese military, and wading through hundreds of gigabytes’ worth of Internet data from sources as far flung as blogs, Google Earth, military journals, even the Chinese equivalent of Fox’s knock-em-up counterterrorism hit, “24” – of Karber’s team to break through the wall are unparalleled. Until now, little was known about this sprawling subterranean network of tunnels bored out to house in secret China’s “increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal,” as the Post notes.As Al Jazeera reports, the 363-page study suggests that many of the tunnels are sitting strategically on border and coastal areas.More chilling, though, is the report’s claim that China’s stockpile of nuclear warheads could be bigger – far, far bigger, in fact – than previously estimated.Prior to this it’s been figured that China had some 80-400 warheads in various stages of deployability. Karber and crew’s figure? 3,000. Couple this with the combined counts of the U.S. and Russia’s known warhead hoards and we could be sitting at roughly 18,000 nuclear weapons between three global superpowers, not to mention any Middle Eastern rumblings.Whether Karber’s findings are what spurred the U.S.‘s Thanksgiving Day flip-flop isn’t clear, of course. And nor should we rush to believe that China is in fact sitting on some 3,000 weapons of mass destruction. But still, how does all this not compound the collective stuff of nightmares?Then again, setting aside religiosity we’re all doomers.Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv.
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