As arms agreements fray, China secretly expands its nuclear weapons infrastructure

When three villagers from China’s Sichuan province wrote to local officials in 2022 asking why the government was confiscating their land and evicting them from their homes, they received a terse reply: It was a “state secret.”

That secret, a CNN investigation has found, centered on China’s covert plans to massively expand its nuclear ambitions. More than three years after the evictions, satellite images show, their village has been flattened and, in its place, new buildings erected to support some of China’s most important nuclear weapons production facilities.

The expansion of the sites in Sichuan province, observed in satellite imagery and a review of dozens of Chinese government documents, supports recent claims by the administration of US President Donald Trump that Beijing has been conducting its most significant nuclear weapon modernization campaign in decades.

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