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According to Beijing, this is a manipulation of the Pentagon on the growth capacity of its nuclear arsenal.
On Thursday, the Chinese government described as manipulation the report of the U.S. Department of Defense on an alleged expansion of the Asian giant's nuclear weapons arsenal, made public in recent days.
According to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, the U.S. Department of Defense report, like previous similar reports, ignores the facts and is full of bias.
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Wang also accused Washington of manipulation and of inflating the thesis of China as a nuclear threat. Moreover, he pointed precisely to the United States as the world's biggest source of a nuclear threat.
China's position came after a Pentagon report was published on Wednesday. It claims that China is developing its nuclear arsenal faster than expected and that it could already launch missiles armed with nuclear warheads from land, sea and air.
#China calificó de "manipulación" el informe del Pentágono de #EEUU que alerta de una supuesta expansión más rápida de la esperada del arsenal nuclear del gigante asiático y cancillería denunció los intentos de inflar la tesis de China como amenaza nuclear pic.twitter.com/fLqc0Vet6q
— Iramsy Peraza (@IramsyteleSUR) November 4, 2021
According to the report, China could have 700 nuclear warheads by 2027 and reach 1,000 by 2030, an arsenal two and a half times larger than the Pentagon forecast just a year ago.
Even with 1,000 nuclear warheads, China's arsenal would be far from matching that of the United States and Russia, which together possess more than 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons: 5,550 for the U.S. and 6,255 for Russia, according to figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).
However, an October 2021 State Department report indicated that the United States possesses just 3,750 nuclear warheads.
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