Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.
The Chinese have called it their “Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.
For the past three years, a small band of obsessively dedicated students at Georgetown University has called it something else: homework.
Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.
The result of their effort? The largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the Chinese military in charge of protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.
What’s interesting here isn’t that the Chinese are busy doing this sort of thing…you’d have to be insane to not think that they’ve been doing stuff like this for years. What’s interesting is the level of intelligence, assuming it’s accurate, gathered by what amounts to basically a buncha hobbyists.
China is building up their economy, becoming the purseholder for several nations, buying up swaths of Africa for farmland, and generally positioning itself to be the dominant world power. Eventually, at this rate, they’ll become the 800-pound gorilla that can sleep anywhere it wants to. Truly, it’s empire building. Sixty years ago it was a nation of feudal warlord-controlled states with virtually no influence outside of its immediate neighborhood….now it buys all of our debt, builds all of our merchandise, competes with all of our industries and influences our foreign relationships.
Anyway, an interesting article. I wonder if the professor that is mentioned in the article will suddenly experience a tragic accident that puts the kibosh on his little endeavour.
