The US has reported that China has significantly increased its nuclear stockpile over the past year and now holds more than 500 operational warheads.

Beijing hopes to double its arsenal to over 1,000 warheads by 2030, according to a Pentagon report.

In spite of this, the Chinese government said it remained committed to the policy of “no first strike”.

In spite of the fact that the report did state that the growth exceeded projections, China’s stockpile is still dwarfed by Russia and the United States.

There are approximately 5,889 nuclear warheads in the Russian nuclear arsenal, while the United States can field 5,244, according to the independent Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Despite the fact that we don’t believe that they [China] are straying very far from where they appeared to be headed, we are pointing out that they are on track to surpass those previous projections as well,” a senior US defence official told reporters on Thursday.

By 2049, President Xi Jinping has announced that China will have a military of “world-class” to defend the country. In the years since he came to power in 2012, he has tried to modernise the country’s armed forces as well as its economy.

In a report released Thursday by the Pentagon, the Pentagon said that China’s current effort to increase its nuclear arsenal will “outperform previous attempts both in terms of scale and complexity”.

There has been speculation that Beijing has completed the construction of three new clusters of missile sites by the end of 2022, according to US officials.

Several new silos for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) will be constructed in these fields, according to the report.

As the name implies, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) have a range of at least 5,500 kilometers (3,400 miles).

Aside from that, he also conceded that China is “moving slightly faster than estimated” towards its stated goal of having 1,000 warheads on the ground.