The Chinese have called it their “Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.
For the past three years, a small band of obsessively dedicated students at Georgetown University has called it something else: homework. Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.
The result of their effort? 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’s critics, however, have questioned the unorthodox Internet-based research of the students.
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. After a devastating earthquake struck Sichuan province, there came pictures of strangely collapsed hills and speculation that the caved-in tunnels in the area had held nuclear weapons. Karber began looking for analysts among his students at Georgetown. They were able to triangulate the location of several tunnel structures, with a rough idea of what types of missiles were stored in each.
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. For Karber, provoking such debate means that he and his small army of undergrads have succeeded.
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