China has sought to give a new lease of life to the DF-5, an obsolete and old operational intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) due to be replaced, with a belated announcement it's tested a MIRV (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle) on this aging missile.
It's given the latest iteration of this missile the designation DF-5C, which will be armed with 10 MIRVs compared to eight on the DF-5B. U.S. military analysts said the DF-5C tests occurred in December 2016 before Donald Trump was sworn in as U.S. president but after his election victory on Nov. 8.
Some analysts, however, contend that making public the news of this test only now means China is again sending a signal to Trump it will defend its patently illegal claim to own the South China Sea, including islands it seized that lie within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague on July 12, 2016 declared illegal China claim to own most of the South China Sea based on what it terms "historic rights." The court also brushed aside as illegal the historic rights claim.
What's odd is that China is spending resources upgrading the obsolete DF-5 since this missile is due for replacement by the more modern DF-41, a new road mobile ICBM still in the flight test stage. Media reports claim the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) deployed the non-operational DF-41s to Heilongjiang province last week, a claim later denied by the People's Liberation Army (PLA).
DF-5 is obsolete, having entered operational service with the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) in 1981. It is probably China's oldest operational ICBM.
What makes it a flawed ICBM is its tedious launch process. The missile is stored horizontally in specially built tunnels, trundled out and raised to the vertical to be fired.
This cumbersome method plus a refueling process that takes over an hour to complete means the DF-5 can only fire some two hours after receiving the order to launch.
Despite its obsolescence, the DF-5 still has a place in the land-based leg of China's nuclear triad. China only had from 50 to 75 operational ICBMs with nuclear warheads on land and on its ballistic missile submarines in 2013, said the U.S. intelligence community.
DF-5 has an operational range of 15,000 kilometers and a flight speed of Mach 22 (26,950 km/h). China has only 20 operational DF-5s (single warhead) and the DF-5B variant (8 MIRVs).