China’s military carried out a rare test-launch of a long-range ballistic missile from one of its nuclear-powered submarines in the South Pacific on Monday, an exercise that drew swift criticism from Australia, New Zealand and Japan and reignited questions about military transparency in a region formally designated free of nuclear weapons.
According to the state-run Xinhua News Agency, the missile lifted off at 12:01 p.m. carrying a dummy, non-nuclear warhead. China’s Ministry of Defense, which reposted the Xinhua statement, described the launch as routine annual training that complied with international law and was not aimed at any country or target.
A rare test, repeated
The launch marks only the second time in decades that China has tested a long-range ballistic missile over open Pacific waters. The country’s last such test came two years earlier, when it fired an intercontinental ballistic missile — also carrying a dummy warhead — into international waters, a launch that was itself the first of its kind since 1980. Analysts at the time read that 2024 test, which mirrors periodic testing the United States conducts for its own submarine-launched missile fleet, as a signal of Beijing’s growing strategic reach. China currently fields six ballistic-missile submarines and 59 nuclear-powered attack submarines, according to estimates from the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based nonproliferation research group.
Why the location matters
The missile came down inside the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, an area established under the 1986 Treaty of Rarotonga that bars the testing, use or threatened use of nuclear weapons throughout the region. China ratified the treaty’s protocols in 1987, committing not to test nuclear arms within the zone or threaten treaty signatories with them. A dummy warhead does not violate the treaty’s ban on nuclear testing, but the choice of the same waters has nonetheless drawn scrutiny from governments in the area, who monitor such launches for their signal about missile range, targeting accuracy and submarine capability rather than any radiological risk.
New Zealand’s government said it received advance notice of the planned launch only hours ahead of time. Foreign Minister Winston Peters said the timing did little to ease longstanding unease his government has voiced about this kind of activity in the region. Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong, speaking from Fiji, called the test destabilizing for the wider Pacific. Japan’s Defense Ministry said it had separately been briefed by Chinese authorities in Beijing beforehand and used the notice to press Beijing to reconsider future tests so that missile trajectories do not cross Japanese airspace or otherwise raise security risks.
Timing and regional backdrop
The test landed on the same day Australia and Fiji signed a new mutual defense treaty widely seen as a counterweight to expanding Chinese influence across the Pacific Islands — a coincidence regional officials were quick to note, even as Beijing’s statement made no reference to the parallel diplomatic development.
For scientists and policy analysts who track missile proliferation, such tests offer rare, if limited, windows into a program’s technical maturity: launch cadence, warhead-separation reliability, and re-entry accuracy over long distances are all things outside observers try to infer from tracking data and public statements, even when — as in this case — governments involved release only sparse technical detail.
