(Kanwa news March 3, 1999) Compared with the TMD, the US National Missile Defence (NMD) has pounded at the Chinese military theorists in a more practical manner. A Chinese strategic scholar indicates to the KWIC reporter that the TMD is now only a project under "exploration" and its political significance well exceeds its usage in the actual combat. The reason why Taiwan is so concerned about such a topic is that it hopes to enhance the atmosphere of the political relationship between Japan, the USA, and Taiwan. In addition, the USA will not see the military strength between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait out of balance. However, quite a few scholars believe that at the current stage, the US NMD development program is intended to be directly aimed at the limited "second nuclear counter-attack" capability of China and the threat of the NMD is more practical than that of the TMD. The NMD will really force China to increase its military investment and to review its existing strategic thinking of "the limited nuclear retaliation".According to the US NMD program, the first three years will be spent on the development of the national missile defence system and another three years will be used for its deployment. The USA will decide in 2000 whether or not it will deploy the national missile defence system. If it is deemed necessary, the USA will first deploy in one area the land-based interceptive missiles within three years, i.e. by the year 2003, in order to gain the initial combat capability. The process from the development of the NMD to the decision to deploy it involves around 2.5 billion US dollars while the actual deployment of one such system including 100 interceptive missiles costs about 7.5 billion US dollars. Thus, the total comes to 10 billion US dollars. One NMD system can handle the attacks of five to twelve ICBMs on the USA. It is exactly equivalent to the "second counter-attack capability" China possesses against the USA.
Obviously, the NMD program is a new provocation to China. It is worth attention what new changes China will make in its theory of nuclear deterrence and how it will associate the theory with the so-called "military struggle to safeguard the territorial integrity", in addition to the possible increase in its ICBMs within a short period of time and to the intensification of its confrontation methods like the multi-warhead attack effectiveness etc..
As early as the crisis in the Taiwan Strait in 1996, China published the pictures of the DF5 ICBM and the commander of the Second Artillery claimed in an exclusive interview with the English-Language China Daily that China had the capability to repulse any nuclear attacks that came from the outside. All these have demonstrated that China has indeed extensively applied its nuclear deterrence. It was the first time in history for China to show its strength through the nuclear deterrence under the circumstances where there existed no external nuclear blackmail (Kanwa news).
