In 1962, a spy in the former Soviet Union informed the British intelligence services that the Soviet Union was preparing to deploy nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. Photographs of the intended installations were included with the intelligence. That intelligence was passed on to the US, who utilized U-2 spy planes to look for evidence of the collaboration. The missiles were discovered in Cuba after this scouting operation. On the same day that the new Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles were on alert, President John F. Kennedy revealed the news.

The Soviets denied any such deployment in Cuba. To refute this denial, Adlai Stevenson, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, presented photographic proof of the missile build-up to the UN Security Council. Kennedy declared an armed embargo on any new shipments to Cuba until the Soviets removed the missiles.

As the existing missiles in Cuba were removed, Soviet freighter ships carrying more missiles returned to the Soviet Union. The leaders of the Cold War countries were able to prevent a nuclear Armageddon as a result of this. The Minuteman missile, which could hit the Soviet Union's motherland from its midwestern base, would eventually be referred to as Kennedy's "ace in the hole." It enabled him to put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Supporters of the Soviet decision to station missiles in Cuba argued that US nuclear-armed missiles in Turkey, for example, might attack the Soviet Union, although Moscow lacked a comparable capability to target the US mainland.

Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, was simply “restoring the strategic balance.” In an agreement with Khrushchev, Kennedy secretly agreed to remove the military's nuclear-tipped, medium-range ballistic Jupiter missiles from Turkey, which most people were unaware of at the time. Critics have frequently used this as evidence that the Soviet choice to station missiles in Cuba was justifiable.

Even though the Jupiter missiles were finally removed from Turkey, Kennedy's announcement of a new deployment of Minuteman missiles in October gave the US the leverage it needed to end the crisis and restore US deterrent capacity against the Soviet Union.

Let's fast forward sixty years. The nuclear development that the US and its allies are currently facing is Chinese, not Soviet. China is obviously building 136–145 new ICBM silos in western China, according to satellite photographs.

Is this something that should pique the interest of US leaders? Is this a new nuclear threat or merely a fair Chinese response to US threats?

While Admiral Charles Richard, the commander of US Strategic Command, has repeatedly warned Congress about China's startlingly robust nuclear build-up, projecting that China will at least double its nuclear capability in the next decade, most official Washington reaction to the Chinese nuclear surprise has been muted.

China is constructing 145 new nuclear-capable long-range ballistic missile silos. This is about the same as constructing one of our Minuteman ICBM wings in North Dakota, Wyoming, or Montana. Based on the original cost of Titan and Minuteman silo-based ICBMs, the cost of such a missile wing in today's dollars would be $17.4 billion.

The Chinese have now constructed railroad tracks and train vehicles capable of transporting ICBMs. They've even dug tunnels into the mountains to conceal such missiles. Former senior Office of the Secretary of Defense official Phillip Karber reported the deployment a few years ago and based on his intelligence, the rail-mobile Chinese tunnel project is anticipated to cost $65 billion, based on tunneling prices provided to the Israelis by the Chinese government.

The launch platforms outside the tunnels were the most notable feature. They're the same range a Chinese ICBM can fly to hit Air Force sites in Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota—the three Minuteman ICBM bases—hardly indicative of a city-busting nuclear deterrence policy.

However, 136–145 silos represent only around 40% of the actual ICBM silos in the US military. So, what's the issue? That is an excellent question. The Chinese DF-41 missile would be installed in these silos. Each missile may carry between six and 10 warheads. The Minuteman missile, on the other hand, carries only one payload and is a very unattractive target.

This might give the Chinese a total of 1360–1450 warheads. According to nuclear expert Mark Schneider, a former top official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who is now a top scholar at the National Institute of Public Policy, multiple-warhead missiles are definitely a first-strike weapon of choice because ICBMs are generally on alert 98–99 percent of the time. Schneider has published a critical evaluation of China's nuclear capabilities.

Such alert levels suggest that the Chinese communists may have 50 percent more weapons on standby than the US does on a daily basis. The US possesses an estimated 400 Minuteman warheads on 400 missiles, as well as four to six Ohio-class submarines at sea on patrol at any given time, each having twenty D-5 missiles and each missile with four to five warheads. That would give the US a combined upper limit of 1,000 on-alert ICBM and SLBM warheads. However, the overall number of warheads on alert is still hundreds less than the new Chinese missile force might deploy.

More importantly, including non-alert warheads, the US deploys an estimated 1550 warheads on a daily basis, including sixty strategic bombers that can carry any number of cruise missiles and gravity bombs but still count as sixty warheads under the New START Treaty's specific counting criteria.

Taking that into consideration, the US could have deployed approximately seventeen hundred to eighteen hundred nuclear bombs if it had put a decent number of its strategic nuclear bombers on alert. As a result, China would have 136–145 new DF-41 ICBM silos. This is based solely on the current low estimate of China's nuclear arsenal. This is serious business, just as the Soviet missile placement in Cuba was serious business. The Soviets sought to put dozens of American cities in jeopardy in order to dissuade the US from defending its NATO and European allies.

The Soviet goal was to break the link between the US deterrent and European security, particularly in light of the Soviet Union's and Warsaw Pact's plans to invade West Germany through the Fulda Gap with conventional forces considerably outnumbering NATO forces protecting Bonn and Berlin.

Because of the United States and NATO's conventional disadvantages, the nuclear deterrent of the United States was critical to the defense of Central Europe and NATO. After all, the long-term goal of the Soviet Union and, more recently, Russia has been to break the NATO alliance. That strategy included deploying threatening missiles in Cuba.

Similarly, the Chinese build is not merely a legitimate Chinese response to the United States' nuclear modernization and alleged nuclear “arms race,” as some Chinese apologists have asserted. It also has nothing to do with the prior deployment of US missile defenses in 2003–4.

There are forty-four interceptors in the United States. It employs these to counter rogue state threats such as those posed by North Korea and Iran. According to some Chinese specialists, it took China two decades to realize that countering US missile defenses necessitated a massive buildup of China's nuclear missile capability.

However, skeptics allege that instead of forty-four interceptors, the US may deploy sixty-six. Even so, such defenses make a Chinese first attack on the US more difficult, but they don't prevent a retaliatory strike. As a result, if China is producing 1360–1450 new warheads, it is not doing so to counter a limited US missile defense deployment. Instead, it's intended to be used as a first- or pre-emptive strike capacity to counteract Chinese aggression, such as military action. This is comparable to Soviet designs for Western Europe in the past.

By updating its own nuclear deterrent, the United States is not initiating an arms race, and the Chinese are not merely following suit or catching up. The current nuclear upgrading program in the United States was approved in December 2010. However, no US missile, submarine, or bomber will enter operational service until 2029.

On the other hand, the Chinese nuclear force has been fully modernized for decades and fresh forces are deployed on a regular basis. At the very least, they will increase their nuclear weapons stockpiles within a decade, prompting Richard to sound the alarm. Unfortunately, the Chinese effectively appeal to the “always blame America” mob, and they have a different reason for the Chinese built to hide their aims. Nonetheless, some experts predict that 90% of the new Chinese missile silos will be filled with phony missile decoys.

Why should we be concerned about only twelve genuine missiles? For deployment and testing, the People's Republic of China would still need to produce about 100-150 missiles. However, building three to five missiles per year for three decades is not practical. For comparison, the estimated cost of building that many missiles in the United States, including the major expense of silo construction, is $21–$23 billion. Warheads and nuclear command, control, and communications network aren't included. So why would the Chinese pay $1.9 billion per missile to add only twelve missiles with 120 warheads to their existing arsenal?