From News.com.au
Embarrassing mistake: Chinese magazine ‘accidentally’ reveals new top secret weapon
A centrefold graphic recently flourished intimate details of a Chinese bomber carrying a stark new weapon. State-controlled media has since gone into cover-up mode. But military analysts think Beijing may have been caught with its pants down.
The government produced
Modern Ships magazine has splashed high-resolution computer-generated images of China’s most recent addition to its strategic bomber line-up – the H-6N – over the front and feature pages.
But that’s not what drew the eye of the world’s defence thinkers.
The graphics showed the new bomber carrying a huge ballistic missile slung under its fuselage. And that missile looks a lot like one of a family of ballistic weapons deployed by China’s People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) as aircraft carrier killers.
Beijing’s state-controlled
Global Times immediately went into damage control mode, declaring, “The images are computer generated, merely conceptual and have no official background.”
But there’s far more to the story than the detailed conceptual images.
And this may confirm Western defence analysts’ worst fears.
COMMENT:-
At US$10,000,000 each (to pick a number at random) the PRC can produce around 375 of those for the cost of one US aircraft carrier.
At six months (to pick a number at random) to produce one of those missiles, the PRC can produce those missiles in around 9.09% of the time that it takes to build one US aircraft carrier.
The logistics of this situation do not look all that rosy for American aircraft carriers.