China has a nifty new nuclear powered torpedo. Xi Jinping is rumored to have ordered Nancy Pelosi’s name stenciled on one of them. He might be needing it soon. This planted leak comes at the same time Pelosi’s plans also leaked out in the press. She wants to pay an inflammatory little visit to Taiwan.
China intentionally leaks
A group of scientists, contracted with the Navy in China, published a paper detailing a “nuclear powered” weapons system in the peer-reviewed Journal of Unmanned Undersea Systems.
They carefully kept all the final design ideas out of the report and call it a “conventional” weapon. The experts say there is no reason at all why it can’t carry a nuke just as easily. Even better, it’s virtually undetectable on it’s undersea cruise, all the way from Shanghai to San Francisco.
Everything is disposable these days, from plastic straws to nuclear reactors. The really long range torpedoes China came up with are “powered by disposable nuclear reactors, which would be dumped on the sea floor.” That gives them an amazing range of “over 6,000 miles.”
Over at The Drive, they write, “imagine low-cost nuclear-powered torpedoes that can travel largely undetected in a swarm across the Pacific Ocean and strike U.S. targets in about a week.” Those are the non-nuclear conventionally armed versions. All it takes is one armed with a nuclear warhead to wipe out any city on the west coast. A swarm of those could snap California right off into the Pacific ocean.
State Department officials have been warning the Pentagon about these for a while now. Their spooks have been picking up all sorts of chatter on the program. China claims they worked the bugs out.
They wrote up a not too controversial and declassified version of the concept in a publication run by China’s biggest naval contractor. The whole idea was to tell the world they have it. Xi Jinping is not pleased with Joe Biden right now. He’s really furious with Nancy Pelosi. She’s crazy enough to actually start trouble in Taiwan.
A 30 knot cruising speed
The design team brags that their disposable nuclear power pack lets the torpedo hit and maintain a 30 knot cruising speed, which is about 35 mph. It gets around 200 hours from the nuclear fuel. When the juice runs out, the power pack is jettisoned to the seabed and conventional batteries take over.
China claims it’s all perfectly safe and nothing can go wrong harming the public. That remains to be seen in practice.
The article revealing the project’s existence didn’t mention the sort of “targets Guo’s team is considering for this weapon.” Industry analysts have concluded that there are a number of differences between the equipment China describes and Russia’s nuclear-powered, nuclear-tipped Poseidon undersea torpedo-drone. Some of them are major.
Poseidon is one of “Vladimir Putin’s six so-called ‘super weapons‘ highlighted in a fiery address in 2019.” A Russian media personality recently threatened to use one or two against Britain. He promised a wall of water to wash the U.K. right off the map.
The version China came up with is incredibly long range. “Its nuclear propulsion and other design elements would allow it to be launched from thousands of miles away and potentially loiter for long periods on standby before prosecuting an attack or being recalled.” That makes them really dangerous.
The biggest difference with the Chinese version is they’re “small enough to fit in a conventional torpedo tube, and can be produced in far great quantities.“
