China’s increasingly advanced military capabilities are alarming the West and reshaping the global balance of naval power, analysts said.
Beijing recently unveiled research submarines capable of traversing the Arctic, and the US expects it to be able to send nuclear-armed boats to the North Pole within a few years, where they would be troublingly close to potential NATO targets, The Wall Street Journal reported.
And the Pentagon believes that China now has anti-ship ballistic missiles capable of striking targets up to 5,000 miles away, a class of weapon described as “carrier killers.” The weapons “pose a potent threat to surface ships across much of the Pacific,” one analyst told the US Naval Institute’s news site.
