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China is rapidly overhauling a network of secret facilities used to manufacture warhead components as it expands its nuclear stockpile faster than any other country, according to an analysis of satellite imagery.

These changes are taking place as Beijing intensifies efforts to be able to retaliate more quickly against an attack, according to expert assessments of official publications — dramatically raising the stakes of any nuclear standoff.

“The levels of changes that we’re seeing since around 2019 to today are probably more extensive than anything we’ve ever seen,” said Renny Babiarz, who led analysis of half a dozen key sites for a project by the Vienna-based Open Nuclear Network (ONN) and the London-based Verification Research, Training, and Information Centre (VERTIC).

China’s rapid expansion of weapons-production facilities continues, even as a Pentagon report last week shows nuclear warhead production has slowed since 2024, with totals in the low 600s, though it’s on track to surpass 1,000 by decade’s end.

President Donald Trump recently said, when discussing plans to restart U.S. nuclear weapons testing, that China could catch up with U.S. nuclear capabilities within five years.

Analysts say it’s unlikely that China could match the estimated 3,700 warheads in the U.S. arsenal in the foreseeable future. But the dramatic changes Beijing has made to almost every part of its nuclear weapons program suggest the People’s Liberation Army is preparing for an all-out arms race, they said, even as it claims it does not want one.

The ONN/VERTIC satellite imagery and expert analysis, shared exclusively with the Washington Post, show that Beijing has sharply accelerated activity at key sites involved in producing nuclear warheads — a burst of expansion since 2021 that could supercharge China’s nuclear ambitions.

The construction includes major upgrades at facilities thought to design and manufacture plutonium pits — the cores of nuclear warheads — as well as plants that produce the high explosives used to trigger nuclear reactions.

Chinese military textbooks, internal publications, and articles by military-affiliated scholars further suggest that nuclear brigades are being placed at higher alert levels and might be shifting toward a launch-on-warning posture, meaning that China would be prepared to retaliate as soon as a missile attack were detected. This is a significant departure from Beijing’s strategy of prioritizing its ability to retaliate after an attack, analysts said.

Together, these changes show how Beijing is developing more versatile munitions and tactics that give it options to threaten the U.S. and its allies, even if it cannot match the size of the U.S. nuclear warhead stockpile.

Infrastructure surge

China’s fast-growing arsenal remains one of the world’s most opaque: Detailed glimpses into how Beijing is positioning itself as a leading nuclear power are rare.

Attention has largely focused on hundreds of missile-silo fields carved into its remote northern deserts since 2021. But satellite imagery of less-scrutinized facilities linked to warhead production indicates that China made significant upgrades across its nuclear weapons supply chain as it built the silos.

Analysts track these sites by matching reports, including declassified government documents and academic papers, with places that have specific structures — such as blast chambers and specialized chemical storage sites — and comparing them to similar facilities elsewhere in the world. They also review military vehicle movement patterns at the Chinese sites.

Nuclear warheads thought to be under construction in China contain a core of fissile material — typically weapons-grade plutonium — manufactured into a spherical shape known as a pit and surrounded by conventional high explosives. When detonated, these explosives compress the fissile core and trigger a chain reaction that releases enormous energy in a nuclear explosion.

Production of pits and high‑explosive components is likely separated across multiple facilities, which have expanded in parallel with testing sites and missile silo fields since around 2020.

In a mountainous area of China’s Sichuan province near the city of Pingtong, a facility to be used for the production of fissile material pits has undergone vast changes in the past five years, according to Babiarz’s analysis. New security fencing has more than doubled the site’s secured footprint, alongside building upgrades and construction across at least 10 locations, including near the core facility where the pits are thought to be produced, the images show.

Pingtong is the only publicly identified plant linked to China’s plutonium pit production.

In research published in the U.S. Air Force-affiliated Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, one analyst describes the site as similar to the Pantex plant in Texas, which assembles and maintains U.S. nuclear warheads — but China’s site has additional plutonium pit production capabilities.

A separate facility in the supply chain — which analysts and previous U.S. government assessments say is probably the primary site for producing the high‑explosive components used to trigger nuclear pits — has also undergone rapid changes. Located in a remote area of Zitong County in Sichuan province, the site has expanded significantly since 2019, according to Babiarz’s analysis of satellite imagery.

There are sweeping changes across the multisite complex. In one area alone, Babiarz identified an extensive security wall under construction since about 2021, a possible new storage area, and large, newly cleared tracts for additional facilities, probably beginning in 2023. The construction is concentrated near sites that appear to be built for testing explosions, including dome-shaped high-explosive test chambers and a shock-tube test site — a roughly 2,000-foot-long tube used to simulate blasts and assess vulnerabilities in new nuclear warhead designs.

At Zitong, Babiarz’s team identified a 430,000-square-foot facility, completed last year, that they assess could be used to assemble, handle, and prepare warhead components, possibly for transport to other locations in China for storage and assembly.

“Based on all the changes that we’re seeing that show a huge investment in these locations, that altogether indicates an improved capability to produce nuclear warheads for the nuclear program,” Babiarz said. While the increased production capacity at the facilities could equate to more warheads, he said it could also mean Beijing is upgrading and modernizing existing warheads.

China’s main nuclear test site, Lop Nur in far western Xinjiang, has also expanded in recent years, with new underground tunnels and large shafts that might be preparations for renewed nuclear testing.

Beijing conducted only 46 tests from 1964 to 1996 — the year it signed, but never ratified, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty — far fewer than the 1,000 carried out by the U.S. and Russia.

China’s initial tests likely resulted in a far greater ability to build a variety of warheads — including smaller and lighter bombs — than was previously recognized, according to a new book by Hui Zhang, a senior research associate at the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University, based on little-known accounts from Chinese nuclear scientists.

Faster retaliation

At the same time as these production facilities were upgraded, Beijing has gradually signaled its ambitions to field a far more diverse nuclear force at higher alertness levels, giving it more tools to pressure the U.S. in an escalating standoff.

The Pentagon report last week said Beijing has made significant strides in developing rapid counterstrike capabilities similar to the U.S. Launch on Warning (LOW) system, which can detect ballistic missiles thousands of miles away and launch a counterstrike before they detonate. It also said China has probably loaded more than 100 solid-propellant ICBMs into silos to support the system and refined the ability to launch multiple missiles simultaneously after late-2024 tests.

Chinese military publications covering the period of the buildup through last year, recently unearthed by Western analysts, suggest that China is readying its nuclear brigades to retaliate as soon as an incoming attack is detected.

China has already built out infrastructure and command structures to support a launch-on-warning posture, although some of its capabilities remain rudimentary, according to analysis of China’s evolving early warning architecture published by the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency last month.

“This is one of the most significant and overlooked aspects of ongoing shifts in China’s nuclear forces,” said David Logan, an assistant professor at Tufts University and one of the authors of the analysis. “What states do with their weapons and how they posture them often matters much more than … how many they field.”

The PLA Rocket Force has “adjusted its nuclear warhead storage and handling practices and training to support regular high alert status” and has now standardized “combat readiness duty” for brigades, according to articles in Rocket Force News, an internal publication, seen by Logan and Phillip Saunders, an expert on the Chinese military at National Defense University.

It is unclear what this duty involves but it might mean that China has more warheads attached to missiles in peacetime, instead of its traditional practice of keeping most warheads in storage. This change would be “a big deal because it’s a big change from how China operated similar forces in the past,” Logan said. “It’s also much riskier.”

Beijing now has a sufficient number of early warning satellites and radars to detect incoming missiles, analysts said. It has a command structure designed to quickly disseminate orders — by fiber-optic cables, microwaves, radios, and satellites — to ensure that nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles can be launched within minutes.

These changes come as Chinese leader Xi Jinping has overseen a massive purge of top generals, including from the Rocket Force, in an attempt to ensure political loyalty and accelerate military modernization, including of the nuclear forces.

Recent Chinese military textbooks have described launch-on-warning systems as essential for national security in peacetime and war and for nuclear and conventional conflicts.

These publications often praise the U.S.’s advanced early warning systems as having strengthened American deterrence and argue that China needs similar capabilities to ensure Washington takes its nuclear forces seriously.

“Strategic early warning is among decisive factors reflecting a nation’s military strength,” said a textbook published by China’s National University of Defense Technology last year. The text also warned that the systems must be exceptionally accurate to avoid an accidental launch.

Another textbook, published in 2023, described advanced early warning systems as allowing a country to use “strategic offensive weapons to gain the initiative in combat” and added that a “powerful, responsive, and globally covered strategic early warning system can create a strong deterrent effect on the opposing side.”

But that ability to deter adversaries comes with additional risks. Throughout the Cold War, technical glitches and human errors in American and Soviet early warning systems created multiple false alarms that nearly ended in disaster.

“For China to abandon its traditional policy of delayed retaliation and move toward rapid response could significantly increase the risk of misunderstanding, overreaction and even incidental nuclear war,” said Tong Zhao, an expert on China’s nuclear weapons program at the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, a Washington think tank.

JERUSALEM — Three months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed Donald Trump as the “greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.” But that friendship — and Netanyahu’s powers of persuasion — will be tested on Monday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where the Israeli leader will meet a U.S. president with increasingly diverging views on practically every Middle East hot spot.

For Netanyahu, the trip to Florida offers a crucial opportunity to convince Trump to take a tougher stance on Gaza and require that Hamas disarm before Israeli troops further withdraw as part of the second phase of Trump’s 20-point peace plan, Israeli officials say. On Iran, Netanyahu is seeking a green light for another strike against the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program, possibly as part of a joint operation with the United States — even though Trump forcefully demanded an end to the 12-day Israel-Iran war in June and declared that Iran’s nuclear program had been “totally obliterated” by U.S. stealth bombers.

On Syria, the Trump administration has bristled at actions by the Israeli military inside the country that undermine efforts by the new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, to consolidate control, with Trump publicly warning Israel this month against doing anything “that will interfere with Syria’s evolution into a prosperous State.” And in Lebanon, Israel has repeatedly bombed Hezbollah targets while demanding that the militant group disarm in accordance with a U.S.-brokered ceasefire, but the strikes have threatened to tip the region into another conflagration on Trump’s watch.

As they meet Monday for the fifth time this year, Netanyahu’s hawkishness will butt up against a U.S. president who has staked his own image and legacy on promoting peace, and Netanyahu may struggle to win Trump’s backing given how the relationship has deteriorated, according to people familiar with the thinking of the two leaders and political observers.

“This is an emergency summit,” said Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs think tank. “The context is a need to clear or purify the air, because there’s been tensions between the two sides. They have different timelines to get to the same destination, which is a Middle East that is liberated from the Iranian regime and its terror proxies, particularly Hamas.”

In recent months, Netanyahu has often appeared to undercut Trump’s self-congratulations for making peace in the region. Israel carried out additional airstrikes on Iran after the president had declared the 12-day war with Israel over last summer, prompting an expletive-laden warning from Trump on television.

Then, following Israel’s airstrike against Hamas negotiators in Qatar as the Gaza peace deal was being hammered out in September, Trump strong-armed Netanyahu into apologizing. “I think he felt like the Israelis were getting a bit out of control in what they were doing and that it was time to be very strong and stop them from doing things that he felt were not in their long-term interests,” Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and U.S. negotiator, said on CBS’s 60 Minutes in October.

Now, Israeli officials have indicated that Netanyahu wants to discuss what Israel sees as a dangerous expansion of Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and the possibility of new joint strikes by Israel and the U.S. This week, the prime minister’s office released an AI-generated video showing Netanyahu and Trump sitting side by side, co-piloting a B-2 bomber — the iconic stealth aircraft that the United States used in June to strike Iran’s nuclear facility at Fordow at Netanyahu’s urging.

But while Trump continues to see Iran near or at the top of his regional concerns, his administration has launched another attempt to negotiate with Tehran and first wants to see the effort play out, according to several people familiar with the president’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive issue. Morgan Ortagus, Trump’s deputy special envoy to the Middle East, told a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that Washington “remains available for formal talks with Iran,” while repeating U.S. insistence that “there can be no [uranium] enrichment.”

Other Trump concerns include Lebanon, where a truce with Israel, brokered by the U.S. and France late last year, is teetering as Netanyahu’s government continues to carry out almost daily bombardments and maintains an army deployment in the southern part of the country, amid charges that Hezbollah has failed to disarm.

“There are mixed policy currents,” said another person familiar with U.S. administration deliberations. “There are those who believe only Israel [is capable of doing] something that can even begin to change Hezbollah’s calculations. … There are others that think you cannot trust what Israel might do as exploding the situation and creating broader chaos.”

Gaza takes center stage

For both Trump and Netanyahu, the most contentious issue will likely be Gaza, not only because of security implications but also its political significance for both leaders. Three months after Trump hailed the peace deal between Israel and Hamas as a “new dawn” for the region, implementation of his 20-point plan has bogged down after the first phase of a ceasefire plan, which has so far seen the release of hostages and prisoners and an increase in humanitarian aid.

Amid contentious conversations between the two governments over who will have final word on what happens in Gaza, none of the main elements of a second phase — a supervising Board of Peace, a committee of Palestinian technocrats to govern Gaza’s internal affairs, and an International Stabilization Force to oversee in part the demilitarization of Hamas — is yet in place, even as Israel frequently strikes at Hamas targets inside Gaza despite the ceasefire agreement.

Israel has been reluctant to advance to the deal’s second phase, which could also see Israel eventually withdraw further from the enclave’s interior, without Hamas first disarming. Israeli officials have also balked at the prospect that Turkey — a bitter rival of Israel but an ally of the U.S. — may gain a foothold in Gaza by deploying its troops there as part of the International Stabilization Force.

On Tuesday, tensions with Washington spiked after Netanyahu’s defense minister, Israel Katz, appeared to flout Trump’s peace plan by declaring that Israel will establish Jewish settlements inside the Gaza Strip, drawing a rebuke from U.S. officials. Two days later, Katz doubled down and reiterated that Israel would never fully withdraw from the Strip.

Earlier, after Israeli forces killed the Hamas commander Raed Sa’ad in Gaza on Dec. 13, Trump told reporters he was “looking into” whether Israel had violated the ceasefire agreement. U.S. officials, meanwhile, warned Netanyahu that “we won’t allow you to ruin President Trump’s reputation after he brokered the deal in Gaza,” Axios quoted a U.S. official as saying.

“I’m not sure the Americans will like [the Israeli perspective on] Gaza because it’s not working according to their plan,” said an Israeli government adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “But for Israel, it has to be total demilitarization, no weapons, no [Hamas] tunnels. And it could take years. We cannot withdraw now.”

For Netanyahu, the trip to Palm Beach, Fla., is further complicated by his political need ahead of the 2026 Israeli elections to project strength and victory on every front, particularly Gaza. Since Oct. 7, 2023, when a Hamas attack left more than 1,200 Israelis dead and 250 taken hostage, Netanyahu has been lambasted by his political opponents for failing to protect Israel. He has also been criticized by Israel’s far right for not doing enough to destroy Hamas, even though the Israeli military carried out a withering, two-year campaign that left more than 70,000 Palestinians dead in Gaza and much of the Strip in ruins.

“There’s the potential for a significant clash on Gaza, because for both of them, it’s the most central issue,” said Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel. “For Trump, he wants to show that this grand deal he struck actually gets implemented, even if he has cut some corners. For Bibi, it’s a serious political risk to go into the election with an arrangement in Gaza that looks like Hamas will survive in some form.”

The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has led to a significant change in strategy, as federal officers shift away from focusing on arresting immigrants already held in local jails to tracking them down on the streets and in communities, according to a Washington Post analysis of government data.

The result has been a huge surge of such at-large arrests, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement tallying about 17,500 in September and on pace to exceed that in October. (The data the Post examined had been updated through the middle of that month.) That was far more than any other month included in the data, which dated back to October 2011.

Before this year, the highest number of at-large arrests came in January 2023, when the Biden administration made more than 11,500. ICE is making more than four times as many at-large arrests per week as it did in President Donald Trump’s first term, the analysis found.

The Post’s analysis highlights a broader pattern in how the Department of Homeland Security is approaching enforcement, even as authorities insist that immigration officers are focusing on violent criminals who they describe as “the worst of the worst.” Government data shows that more than 60% of the people detained in at-large arrests since June did not have criminal convictions or pending charges.

Former DHS officials said the effort demonstrates a less targeted approach and reflects mounting pressure from senior White House and DHS officials to boost deportation totals.

“That is consistent with their mandate to remove anybody in the country who doesn’t have authorization,” said Sarah Saldaña, who served as ICE director under President Barack Obama. “To me, that is a waste of resources.”

The administration’s new approach began to take shape in June, when federal immigration agents launched a large-scale enforcement operation in Los Angeles. In the ensuing five months, ICE’s at-large arrests in communities nationwide totaled 67,800, more than twice the total number during the previous five months.

In June, September, and October, such arrests — which include people detained in their homes, at work sites, during immigration check-ins, or in other public spaces — accounted for more than half of ICE’s total number of monthly arrests for the first time since April 2023.

Administration officials have set a goal of 1 million deportations in Trump’s first year of his second term, and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has pressed for 3,000 immigration arrests per day.

Daily arrests are lagging well behind that number. The highest number of single-day arrests by ICE took place when its officers detained more than 1,900 on June 4.

The total number of overall arrests, however, rose by 60% in the period from June through mid-October, compared with the first five months of the Trump administration, the data showed. In September, ICE had 21 days in which it made 1,000 or more arrests, the highest number of such days in any month this year.

“The shift in tactics is related to the ongoing process from the White House to up numbers, and the easiest way to do that is to do broader-brush approaches,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official in the Biden administration.

ICE is the lead federal agency in charge of immigration enforcement inside the United States, while U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) typically focuses on the border. Historically, ICE officers have detained most immigrants inside prisons or jails after they have been charged with a crime or completed their sentences.

Many local jails flag undocumented immigrants for removal and contact ICE directly. ICE also has the authority to monitor local arrests through a fingerprint-sharing program. The agency often files a detainer requesting that jails hold potential deportees for up to 48 hours for federal officers to take custody.

By comparison, at-large arrests typically require more human and financial resources to carry out, immigration experts said. ICE’s website says that such arrests “are unpredictable and can be dangerous to the public.”

In a statement, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said 70% of the immigrants arrested by ICE have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges in the United States and that some have convictions or charges in their home countries.

The Post’s examination found that from Jan. 20, when Trump took office, through Oct. 15 about 36% of ICE detainees had criminal convictions and 30% had pending charges.

“This story only reveals how the media manipulates data to peddle a false narrative that DHS is not targeting the worst of the worst,” McLaughlin said. “Nationwide our law enforcement is targeting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens — including murderers, rapists, gang members, pedophiles, and terrorists.”

The DHS data for this story was obtained through a public records request filed by the Deportation Data Project, a group of academics and lawyers that collects and releases immigration enforcement data. The Post used to the data to conduct its own analysis.

The data does not include information on immigration arrests made by other federal departments, including CBP, whose Border Patrol division has taken on an increasingly prominent role in the Trump administration’s enforcement strategy in recent months. In Chicago, Border Patrol agents came under federal court scrutiny for the deployment of tear gas in response to protesters.

As the overall number of arrests increased nationally, the number of people without a criminal record arrested by ICE since June nearly tripled, according to the Post’s analysis. (That includes both at-large arrests and arrests at jails.) Since September, more than 40% of those arrested by ICE had no criminal records.

That trend is continuing. Nearly half of the 79,000 people ICE arrested and placed in detention between Oct. 1 and the end of November did not have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, according to separate government data obtained by the Post. (Those arrests included CBP arrests, which make up a small percentage of the total.) Of the migrants who do have criminal convictions, nearly a quarter were traffic offenses, that data showed.

Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, said that the data showing relatively few detainees have committed serious crimes is not surprising.

“ICE is getting the worst of the worst,” she said. “But they’re also picking up a lot of people who either have no criminal charge … or convictions — or they have relatively minor convictions.”

Federal data suggests that the administration’s goal of boosting detentions was aided by high-profile targeted enforcement operations that lasted for weeks in large cities, including Los Angeles; Boston; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago; many of which drew significant public protests.

The District of Columbia experienced the largest spike in arrests, with the number increasing fivefold from June through October as compared with the previous five months, the federal data showed.

In Illinois, 428 people were arrested between Jan. 20 and May 31 who had no criminal records. That number more than tripled to 1,408 from June 1 through Oct. 15, a period that included a targeted enforcement campaign in Chicago titled Operation Midway Blitz.

Jason Houser, former ICE chief of staff in the Biden administration, said that the Trump administration is “trying to find the lowest bar of calling somebody a criminal.”