This is John Bachelor, a conversation with colleague Rick Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center about the Nuclear Weapon Capabilities of the People's Republic of China, regionally, not globally, regionally.

Bill does account thanks to the Pentagon's numbers and his estimate on the basis of how many

bombers and how many crews missiles. We're looking at

regional domination with tactical nuclear weapons.

Rick Fisher on the Chinese nuclear arsenal regionally, locally, eastern Asia.

More of this tonight.

The annual Pentagon China military power reports have been providing us numbers for Chinese

regional ballistic missiles land-based ballistic missiles.

And that number tops out most recently at about 2,800, 2,800, but it does not include the number of air-launched land attack

cruise missiles. If you take the total of Chinese bombers, cruise missile carrying bombers about 150,

and they each carry six cruise missiles and let's say all of them fly three sorties

uh... fully armed with those six cruise missiles uh... you get a count of about 2,700 potential

weapons. Now, defense department officials have recently begun stating that China has about a thousand dual capable

weapons in Asia. That means potentially up to a thousand of these missiles may be nuclear armed.

Now the Chinese have been telling us for 25 or more years that they basically in the name of peace do not have tactical nuclear

weapons.

I think that's a blatant lie in deception.