This is a CBS Island World. I'm John Bachelor with Gordon Chang, my colleague and co-host and friend,

and we very much welcome Rick Fisher, Senior Fellow International Assessment and Strategy

Center, who has a new page up about the Chinese ICBM program, especially when it comes to

nuclear threat, not just this decade, but into the next decade.

Rick, a very good evening to you, thank you much.

What we're looking at is updating expectations of the PLA build-out two parts, the ICBMs and the nuclear.

At this point they're wetted in, we can presume, in those silos in the northwest. However, what does

what do the 2030s look like? What are they building to? What is the

expectation? Good evening to you, Rick. Good evening, John.

In my opinion, China seeks to achieve a level of nuclear superiority over the United States.

It is... over the United States.

It is basically completed the construction of about 300 new intercontinental ballistic missile silos in three fields in China's western deserts.

There has been some discordant reporting, especially out of the Bloomberg service to the effect

citing nebulous intelligence sources that these silos may not be completed.

They may have been, there's a shoddy work and missiles may be filled with water instead of fuel.

But the report has a lot of holes in it itself.

China is putting solid fuel ballistic missiles in these silos,

not liquid-fueled missiles, and other aspects of that story take away from its credibility.

And when China builds these silos and has two, maybe three or four companies dedicated to the production of solid fuel

missiles that could that are ICBMs or could be turned into ICBMs, we have to take this build up very seriously.

And what I offered for a presentation for the new National Institute for Deterrence Studies on the 19th was a projection

based on open source estimates today, then adding new missiles that I expect

...