A new, road mobile intercontinental ballistic missile may have been sighted (see update at bottom) in a city in northern China. The Dong Feng ("East Wind") -41 missile, or DF-41, can carry up to a dozen nuclear warheads is claimed to have longest range of any nuclear missile in the world. The announcement of the missiles could be a warning to U.S. President Donald Trump, who is known for sharply worded anti-Chinese rhetoric and has announced plans for a new ballistic missile system.

China's Global Times newspaper newspaper cited eyewitness photos culled from Chinese social media by news media in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The photos showed heavy missile launchers, also known as transporter/erector/launchers (TELs) moving through Daqing City in Heilongjiang.

The DF-41 reportedly has a range of 8,699 miles, enough to hit any target on Earth with the exception of South America and parts of Antarctica. It can carry up to 12 nuclear warheads, and travels on China's nationwide network of roads to make it difficult to track down and destroy.

Alleged DF-41 TEL

The location of the missiles and the timing of the release are notable. Heilongjiang Province is in Northern China, near the country's long border with Russia. The DF-41's long range, if accurate, means it could be based anywhere and still hit any useful target on Earth, but the implication is that China considers Russia a friendly country.

While China tends to be low-key regarding nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence, this seems like signaling from one party to another. After all, it was probably completely unnecessary to move strategic nuclear weapons through a city of 2.9 million people, unless you want to get the word out. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has been talking tough about China as well as enhancing America's ballistic missile shield. If China wanted to overwhelm the shield with more missiles, the DF-41 would be the way to do it.

America's ballistic missile shield is provided by the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GBMD) system. The system has 37 Ground-Based Interceptors, 33 at Fort Greeley, Alaska and four at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Each GBI is designed to shoot down enemy warheads passing through space after they have separated from the actual missile, about midway through their flight to their targets.

The third Ground Based Interceptor on its way to the silo, September 2004. Department of Defense photo.

The system isn't perfect. The Pentagon reckons that each GBI has a fifty percent chance of successfully intercepting a warhead, and so it plans to to shoot five GBIs at each warhead. Theoretically, that should be enough to ensure one hundred percent success. Theoretically.

GBMD was always meant to prevent rogue nations—think Iran and North Korea—from launching nuclear missiles at the United States. Developing ICBMs is such an expensive effort that neither country would not be able to launch more than a handful of missiles. With 37 GBIs, the United States would hopefully be able to shoot down up to seven warheads.

The system has worried America's potential nuclear adversaries, Russia and China, for whom nuclear deterrence only works if their missiles can hit U.S. targets. If the U.S. builds more Ground-Based Interceptors, they could theoretically stop a Chinese or Russian nuclear attack.

Alleged DF-41 TEL on the road.

China has a No First Use policy, which states it will never use nuclear weapons first in a conflict—but it does reserve the right to retaliate in kind. China has always maintained a small number of ICBMs--only about 54 are capable of hitting the U.S.—compared to the 400 Minuteman III ICBMs sitting in silos in North Dakota and Wyoming. China has traditionally placed one huge, 5 megaton city-smashing warhead on its older DF-5 missiles. That's 5,000 kilotons of thermonuclear firepower; the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Hiroshima was only about 17 kilotons.

Ground Based Interceptor launch.

Missiles such as ICBMs are meant to lift nuclear warheads into space, setting them on trajectories that will land them on their targets thousands of miles away. The weakness in the U.S. system is that it strikes warheads only after they have separated from missiles. With the DF-41 ICBM, however, the difficulty of defending against an attack rapidly increases over time. In the first five minutes, you have a one missile problem. After that, you have a twelve warhead problem. So for one missile, you suddenly need sixty GBI interceptors to shoot down all the warheads with total certainty. Fifty four Chinese missiles with 12 warheads each presents the United States with a problem that only 3,240 Ground-Based Interceptors could solve.

China's stockpile of fissile materials--plutonium and highly enriched uranium--is only enough for about 250 nuclear weapons. So each DF-41 would likely carry so-called "penetration aids", fake warheads, radar-confusing chaff, and other payloads meant to confuse and present more targets to U.S. defenses than there are actual warheads. Each DF-41 could carry just one actual warhead and eleven fakes. Unless the U.S. could tell them apart, it would still be forced to shoot all of them down.

China's parading of ICBMs through cities is likely meant as a message to the new administration of President Donald Trump, which has promised to build a new, "state of the art ballistic missile defense system". The message is: "That's not enough."

(Update: Gregory Kulacki, a Chinese nuclear weapons expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, has debunked the photos as not being of a DF-41 but a smaller missile. Kulacki notes that the wheeled missile transporter is similar in size to the Russian Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile system, but the large size of Chinese warheads, which are not miniaturized to the extent U.S. and Russian warheads are, limits the Chinese missile to 1-2 warheads at most.)

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