Chinese army engineers run first triple-nuke-strike experiment in lab
PLA scientists trial cutting-edge military technology aimed at completely destroying enemy targets in multi-pronged attack
The US military launched a covert strike on Iranian nuclear facilities in June, dropping several massive bunker-busting bombs on a single target. While US officials claimed the sites were completely destroyed, some reports suggested the core of these facilities might have survived.
This scenario underscores a persistent challenge in modern warfare: even the most powerful conventional weapons may fail to eliminate deeply buried, hardened underground targets.
But what if nuclear weapons were used instead – not just one, but a coordinated sequence of multiple warheads striking the same location in rapid succession?
A new study by Chinese scientists, published on September 10, in the peer-reviewed journal Explosion and Shock Waves, suggests the Chinese military has taken a major step towards answering the question with cutting-edge experimental technology.
The research, led by Xu Xiaohui, an associate professor with the Army Engineering University of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in Nanjing, details the development of the world’s first laboratory system capable of simulating the effects of multi-point, high-yield nuclear explosions deep underground – specifically, the impact of three nuclear warheads detonating in close succession at the same target.
Historically, studies on nuclear earth-penetration effects have focused on single-warhead detonations, as analysts have long assumed that a single high-yield bunker buster could collapse or destroy deeply buried facilities.
But modern defence engineering advances rapidly. Xu’s team argues that new low-yield, precision-guided, earth-penetrating nuclear weapons – now reportedly operational in US and Russian arsenals – are being designed with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles.
These warheads can be programmed to strike the same location in a “cluster” or “focused” pattern, potentially creating a synergistic destructive effect far greater than the sum of individual blasts.
Until now, however, such multi-point nuclear attacks have existed only in theory.
No nation had a reliable way to physically simulate or test the combined cratering and shock effects of multiple simultaneous or near-simultaneous underground nuclear explosions – especially at realistic scales, according to Xu and his colleagues.
The PLA team’s breakthrough lies in a novel vacuum chamber-based test system, which allows researchers to model large-scale nuclear cratering effects at a fraction of the cost and risk of full-scale testing.
Using principles of similitude theory, the system scales down massive nuclear blasts into small, controlled experiments.
The core of the set-up is a miniature explosive source system based on a two-stage high-pressure gas gun that fires small projectiles to rupture pressurised glass spheres containing simulated blast gas.
This mimics the rapid energy release of a nuclear detonation in a highly controllable and repeatable way.
Crucially, the system enables multiple explosive sources to be triggered with near-perfect synchronisation. The study reports a timing discrepancy of just 0.8 milliseconds between detonations – negligible on the timescale of underground shock wave propagation.
The experimental results are striking.
In simulations based on the US “Palanquin” test, an underground test in 1965 with a single 4.3-kiloton warhead at 85 metres (279 feet) depth, the three-point explosion more than doubled the crater radius from 46 to 114 metres and increased the crater depth from 28 to over 35 metres.
It also boosted the crater volume by an order of magnitude compared to a single detonation of the same total yield.
Most significantly, the projected surface damage area – a proxy for the zone of destruction – expanded from 6,600 to over 80,000 square metres, about three-fifths as big as the Pentagon.
Even in a shallower scenario – 5 kilotons at 20 metres depth – the triple strike increased the surface damage area four times, showing that multi-point attacks were consistently more effective at maximising destruction.
“This study, for the first time, shows through a comparison of simulation results with prototype test data that deeply buried multi-point explosive sources exhibit significantly higher cratering efficiency than single-point sources, providing data support for coordinated multi-warhead penetration strategies using nuclear earth-penetrating weapons,” Xu’s team wrote.
These findings would also “directly serve the nation’s security and protection needs for deep underground engineering”, they added.
But to achieve such precise, synchronised multi-warhead strikes, a military would need extremely advanced capabilities, including hypersonic delivery systems with high terminal accuracy, advanced flight control and timing synchronisation, and robust command, control and communication systems to coordinate warhead detonation sequences.
These were not capabilities associated with traditional nuclear arsenals, but some advanced nuclear weapons deployed recently could have solved these problems, according to the study.
Moreover, by using low-yield warheads (around 5 kilotons), such strikes could be framed as “limited” or “tactical”, reducing the political threshold for nuclear use – a concept that has drawn increasing interest from policymakers in Washington.