عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
World

China's Xi Says 'Reunification' with Taiwan is Inevitable

FILE PHOTO: Chinese officials, led by President Xi Jinping, attend a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin in Beijing, China, December 20, 2023. Sputnik/Dmitry Astakhov/Pool via REUTERS
FILE PHOTO: Chinese officials, led by President Xi Jinping, attend a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin in Beijing, China, December 20, 2023. Sputnik/Dmitry Astakhov/Pool via REUTERS
TT
20
TT

China's Xi Says 'Reunification' with Taiwan is Inevitable

FILE PHOTO: Chinese officials, led by President Xi Jinping, attend a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin in Beijing, China, December 20, 2023. Sputnik/Dmitry Astakhov/Pool via REUTERS
FILE PHOTO: Chinese officials, led by President Xi Jinping, attend a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin in Beijing, China, December 20, 2023. Sputnik/Dmitry Astakhov/Pool via REUTERS

China's "reunification" with Taiwan is inevitable, President Xi Jinping said in his New Year's address on Sunday, striking a stronger tone than he did last year with less than two weeks to go before the Chinese-claimed island elects a new leader.
The Jan. 13 presidential and parliamentary elections are happening at a time of fraught relations between Beijing and Taipei. China has been ramping up military pressure to assert its sovereignty claims over democratically governed Taiwan.
China considers Taiwan to be its "sacred territory" and has never renounced the use of force to bring it under Chinese control, though Xi made no mention of military threats in his speech carried on state television.
"The reunification of the motherland is a historical inevitability," Xi said, though the official English translation of his remarks published by the Xinhua news agency used a more simple phrase: "China will surely be reunified".
"Compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," he added. The official English translation wrote "all Chinese" rather than "compatriots", Reuters reported.
Last year, Xi said only that people on either side of the strait are "members of one and the same family" and that he hoped people on both sides will work together to "jointly foster lasting prosperity of the Chinese nation".
China has taken particular exception to current Vice President Lai Ching-te, the presidential candidate for Taiwan's ruling Democratic Party (DPP) and leading in opinion polls by varying margins, saying he is a dangerous separatist.
Responding late on Saturday to Lai's comments at a live televised presidential debate earlier in the day, China's Taiwan Affairs Office said Lai had "exposed his true face as a stubborn 'worker for Taiwan independence' and destroyer of peace across the Taiwan Strait".
"His words were full of confrontational thinking," spokesperson Chen Binhua said in a statement.
Since 2016 - when President Tsai Ing-wen took office - the DPP-led government has promoted separatism and is the "criminal mastermind" in obstructing exchanges across the strait and damaging the interests of Taiwan's people, Chen said.
"As the leading figure of the DPP authorities and current DPP chairman, Lai Ching-te cannot escape his responsibility for this," he added.

Most Viewed

 
World

How the US Used Its Bunker-Buster Bombs at Iranian Nuclear Sites

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine, responds to a question during a press conference about Operation Midnight Hammer at the Pentagon, June 22, 2025 in Washington, DC. (dpa)
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine, responds to a question during a press conference about Operation Midnight Hammer at the Pentagon, June 22, 2025 in Washington, DC. (dpa)
TT
20
TT

How the US Used Its Bunker-Buster Bombs at Iranian Nuclear Sites

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine, responds to a question during a press conference about Operation Midnight Hammer at the Pentagon, June 22, 2025 in Washington, DC. (dpa)
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine, responds to a question during a press conference about Operation Midnight Hammer at the Pentagon, June 22, 2025 in Washington, DC. (dpa)

The deep penetrating bombs that the US dropped into two Iranian nuclear facilities were designed specifically for those sites and were the result of more than 15 years of intelligence and weapons design work, the Pentagon’s top leaders said Thursday.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a press briefing that they are confident the weapons struck exactly as planned.

Caine, the nation’s top military officer, offered new details about the work that went into building the “bunker-buster” bombs and how the US used them to burrow into the Iranian sites. He sought to show the level of destruction but did not directly address President Donald Trump’s assertion that Tehran’s nuclear program has been “obliterated.”

Classified briefing

The bombs, called the GBU-57 A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, have their roots in a decades-old classified briefing “of what looked like a major construction project in the mountains of Iran,” Caine said.

That turned out to be the Fordo fuel enrichment plant, with construction believed to have started around 2006. It became operational in 2009, the same year Tehran publicly acknowledged its existence.

The classified briefing was shown in 2009 to a Defense Threat Reduction Agency officer, who with a colleague “lived and breathed” Fordo for the next 15 years, studying the geology, construction dig, the earth moved and “every piece of equipment going in and every piece of equipment going out," Caine said.

What they concluded: The US didn't have a bomb that could destroy those sites. So the Pentagon got to work, Caine said.

“We had so many Ph.D.s working on the mock program — doing modeling and simulation — that we were quietly and in a secret way the biggest users of supercomputer hours within the United States of America,” he said.

How the bunker busters are designed

The 30,000-pound bomb is comprised of steel, explosives and a fuse programmed to a specific detonation time. The longer the fuse, the deeper the weapon will penetrate before exploding.

Over the years, the military tested and retested it hundreds of times on mock facilities, Caine said. Crews fine-tuned the bombs to detonate in the mock enrichment rooms, delaying detonation until they had reached a position to send a pressure blast through open tunnels to destroy equipment underground.

How the US said it bombed an Iranian underground nuclear facility

Fordo had two main ventilation routes into the underground facility and officials carefully eyed these entry points as a way to target the site.

Each route had three shafts — a main shaft and a smaller shaft on either side, which looked almost like a pitchfork in graphics provided by the Pentagon. In the days preceding the US attack, Iran placed large concrete slabs on top of both ventilation routes to try to protect them, Caine said.

In response, the US crafted an attack plan where six bunker-buster bombs would be used against each ventilation route, using the main shaft as a way down into the enrichment facility.

Seven B-2 stealth bombers were used, carrying two of the massive munitions apiece. The first bomb was used to eliminate the concrete slab, Caine said.

The next four bombs were dropped down the main shaft and into the complex at a speed of more than 1,000 feet per second before exploding, he said. A sixth bomb was dropped as a backup in case anything went wrong.

In addition to the 12 bombs dropped on Fordo, with six on each ventilation route, two more hit Iran's main Natanz facility, Caine said.

Each crew was able to confirm detonation as they saw the bombs drop from the aircraft in front of them: “We know that the trailing jets saw the first weapons function,” Caine said.

The pilots reported back that it was the brightest explosion they had ever seen — that it looked like daylight, he said.

Questions remain about the whereabouts of Iran's highly enriched uranium

Caine said the munitions were built, tested and loaded properly, guided to their intended targets and then exploded as designed.

“Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed,” Hegseth said.

However, questions remained as to whether the highly enriched uranium that Iran would need to develop a nuclear weapon was at the site at the time. Asked repeatedly, Hegseth did not say if the uranium had been destroyed or moved.

“I’m not aware of any intelligence that I’ve reviewed that says things were not where they were supposed to be — moved or otherwise,” Hegseth said.