And why is it such a big deal if China's building these possible silo sites? I mean, at this point, they're just holes in the ground, right?

That's absolutely right. They're holes in the ground for now. But think about the math here. You've got 110 silos at this new field, and you have 130 or 40 at another field that was discovered last month. And in each one you can put a missile, and atop those missiles you can put three or four nuclear warheads. So quickly, China could be preparing to quintuple its nuclear program. And that is a huge shift in strategy.

What do you mean? What has the strategy been up to this point? Well,

for decades, nuclear weapons haven't really been a big focus of China's military strategy. You know, Sabrina, back in the 1960s, as the nuclear arms race was heating up between the Soviet Union and the U.S., we saw stockpiling of massive numbers of nuclear arms, tens of thousands in the hands of Moscow and Washington. Chairman Mao said, let those internal and external reactionary cliques face us in trepidation. But China made a different decision at that time, not to be a major player in that race. With indomitable and indefatigable efforts, the Chinese people will steadily attain their objectives. They decided instead to maintain just a minimum deterrent, just enough nuclear weapons to ward off attack, but not enough to actually get into the race themselves. Preparations for our nation's first nuclear test are intensely underway. Mao Zedong's thoughts guide us in all our work. So they developed their nuclear weapons in the late 50s and early 60s. They tested them first in October 1964 to demonstrate to the world that they knew how to make them work. And Mao Zedong, who of course was the founder of modern China and the head of the Chinese Communist Party and the country's undisputed leader, didn't go ahead and build a massive stockpile the way the Americans did or the Russians did. and its money elsewhere. He wanted to spend on agriculture. He wanted to spend on building up industry into what ultimately became, long after his death, the world's second largest economy. So they never got into the arms race. That's exactly right. They built this small, minimal force. They said this should be enough to demonstrate that we could hit Moscow or New York, and they called it a day and went on to other things.