China’s nuclear tunnels and US-Mexico drug tunnels (ZT)

China’s nuclear tunnels and US-Mexico drug tunnels (ZT)

Study at Georgetown University

“Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide China’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.  For the past three years, a small band of dedicated students at Georgetown University has called it something else: homework.  Their effort leads to the largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the Chinese military in charge of protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.  The study is yet to be released, but already it has sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top officials in the Pentagon, including the Air Force vice chief of staff.

The study’s critics, however, have questioned the unorthodox Internet-based research of the students, who drew from sources as disparate as Google Earth, blogs, military journals and, perhaps most startlingly, a fictionalized TV docudrama about Chinese artillery soldiers.  Beyond its impact in the policy world, the project has made a profound mark on the students — including some who have since graduated and taken research jobs with the Defense Department and Congress.

“I don’t even want to know how many hours I spent on it,” said Nick Yarosh, 22, an international politics senior at Georgetown. “But … I was in this club. I can say I spent it reading Chinese nuclear strategy and Second Artillery manuals. For a nerd like me, that really means something.”

The students’ professor, Phillip A. Karber, 65, had spent the Cold War as a top strategist reporting directly to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Karber prided himself on recruiting the best intelligence analysts in the government.

After a devastating earthquake struck Sichuan province, the chairman of Karber’s committee noticed Chinese news accounts reporting that thousands of radiation technicians were rushing to the region. Then, came pictures of strangely collapsed hills and speculation that the caved-in tunnels in the area had held nuclear weapons.

“The fact that there were no answers to that really got to me,” said former student Dustin Walker, 22. “… people kept coming back, even after graduation. . . . ”  Over time, the team grew to roughly two dozen. Most spent their time studying the subterranean activities of the Second Artillery Corps.  The students turned to publicly available Chinese sources — military journals, local news reports and online photos posted by Chinese citizens.

The Internet also generated a raft of leads: new military forums, blogs and once-obscure local TV reports now posted on the Chinese equivalents of YouTube. Strategic string searches even allowed the students to get behind some military we sites and download documents such as syllabuses taught at China’s military academies.

Drudgery and discoveries

Each semester, Karber managed to recruit only one or two Chinese-speaking students. So the team assembled a makeshift system to scan images of the books and documents they found.  They highlighted key passages for finer translation by the Chinese speakers.  The students had compiled a searchable database of more than 1.4 million words on the Second Artillery and the tunnels by combining everything they found in the journals, video clips, satellite imagery and photos, they were able to triangulate the location of several tunnel structures, with a rough idea of what types of missiles were stored in each.

Their work also yielded smaller revelations: how the missiles were kept mobile and transported from structure to structure, as well as tantalizing images and accounts of a “missile train” and disguised passenger rail cars to move China’s long-range missiles.  To facilitate the work, Karber set up research rooms for the students at his home in Great Falls.  Some of the biggest breakthroughs came after members of Karber’s team used personal connections in China to obtain a 400-page manual produced by the Second Artillery and usually available only to China’s military personnel.

Another source of insight was a pair of semi-fictionalized TV series chronicling the lives of Second Artillery soldiers.  The plots were often overwrought with melodrama — one series centers on a brigade commander who struggles to whip his slipshod unit into shape while juggling relationship problems with his glamorous Olympic-swim-coach girlfriend. But they also included surprisingly accurate depictions of artillery units’ procedures that lined up perfectly with the military manual and other documents.

“Until someone showed us on screen how exactly these missile deployments were done from the tunnels, we only had disparate pieces. The TV shows gave us the big picture of how it all worked together,” Karber said.

 A bigger Chinese arsenal?

In December 2009, just as the students began making progress, the Chinese military admitted for the first time that the Second Artillery had indeed been building a network of tunnels. According to a report by state-run CCTV, China had more than 3,000 miles of tunnels — roughly the distance between Boston and San Francisco — including deep underground bases that could withstand multiple nuclear attacks.

The news shocked Karber and his team. The assumption for years has been that the Chinese arsenal is relatively small — anywhere from 80 to 400 warheads.   Based on the number of tunnels the Second Artillery is digging and its increasing deployment of missiles, he argues, China’s nuclear warheads could number as many as 3,000.  This year, the Defense Department’s annual report on China’s military highlighted for the first time the Second Artillery’s work on new tunnels, partly a result of Karber’s report, according to some Pentagon officials. And in the spring, shortly before a visit to China, some in the office of then-Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates were briefed on the study.

US-Mexico Drug Tunnel

Federal agents in California have uncovered the "most sophisticated" drug tunnel in years, the latest discovery in what an official said had become a "major phenomenon" in the war on drugs.

The tunnel was discovered by San Diego's Tunnel Task Force in cooperation with Mexican authorities, Mack said. The task force, whose sole job is to uncover drug smuggling tunnels, is made up of agents from ICE, Customs and Border Protection and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Earlier this month, U.S. authorities nabbed 14 tons of marijuana from warehouses connected by a drug tunnel from Mexico to south San Diego. That tunnel was built with structural support and had the electric lighting and ventilation. Just a few days ago, a pair of similar tunnels were uncovered in the Arizona border town of Nogales.