Hey friends.
Somewhere in a Chinese defense lab, a team of engineers looked at the modern battle tank, arguably one of the most mature, over-engineered, thoroughly optimized weapons categories humans have ever built, and decided it needed a nuclear reactor and a rail gun.
This is actually one of the more interesting stories in miltech this week.
(Although, I did see a story that Polish military forensic officials were having difficulty scanning a Russian Gerbera drone with X-rays. That’s probably worth a look. I’ll dig into that later this week if nothing else hits the news before then.)
Besides, I don’t talk about China near as much as I should. I just saw a Chinese product that uses Lidar to find the signature of mosquitos flying around your house, then uses lasers to shoot them out of the air.
So, like a miniature directed-energy air defense system for your home. It costs $5,000.
My point is, if we sleep on China, one day we’re going to wake up and have been outengineered.
Okay, so what about this nuclear tank?
This is a peer-reviewed concept study, published in June in the Chinese journal Acta Armamentarii, written by researchers from Inner Mongolia First Machinery Group, a real state-linked defense contractor (similar to General Dynamics) with actual decades of tank-building experience, alongside academics from the Beijing Institute of Technology.
Nobody is bending metal on this thing yet.
But the concept itself is worth looking at, because of what it says about where armored warfare might be headed, and because China has already quietly developed several of the individual pieces this design depends on.
Wait Wes, aren’t tanks on the modern battlefield dead? With drones and whatnot?
Well, the Chinese engineers have a plan for that too: Electromagnetic armor.
What they’re proposing
Here’s the core idea: A 60-ton armored vehicle, roughly in line with a modern main battle tank’s weight class, powered by a 10-megawatt-class small modular reactor and armed with a 50-megajoule electromagnetic railgun.
Chinese researchers estimate that railgun could hurl a projectile to roughly 3.5 kilometers per second, giving it a theoretical strike range somewhere around 280 miles, closer to an artillery rocket than anything currently mounted on a tank turret.
For scale, a modern tank’s main gun typically reaches out a few miles, maybe low double digits under ideal conditions with a guided round.
This concept is describing a tank that could theoretically hit a target the distance from Boston to Washington, D.C. Whether that ever becomes militarily useful is a separate question we’ll get to.
First, let’s talk about how you’d even build the thing.
Here’s the part I appreciate about this paper… The researchers have laid out a very plausible three-stage development path, each stage building the electrical infrastructure the next one will need.
