Satellite snaps rare photo appearing to show Chinese submarine using secretive underwater cave at South China Sea base

Ryan Pickrell

• A Planet Labs satellite captured a rare photo of a Chinese submarine at what is believed to be the entrance of a undersea tunnel at a People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) base on Hainan Island.
• Yulin Naval Base, a strategic outpost in the South China Sea, is home to nuclear-powered fast-attack and ballistic-missile submarines.
• Experts argue that the tunnels at the base offer protection and important advantages through deception.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

A Planet Labs commercial satellite managed to capture a rare photo this week of a Chinese submarine at what observers believe is the entrance of a secretive undersea cave at a strategically important naval base.

The photo, first posted online by Radio Free Asia, appears to show a Chinese Type 093 Shang-class nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine at Yulin Naval Base on Hainan Island in the South China Sea, The War Zone reported.

The important base sits at a strategic gateway to not only the contested South China Sea but also Taiwan and the Western Pacific.

China likes to hide some of its strategic assets underground. For instance, the “Underground Great Wall of China” is the name given to the network of tunnels China is believed to use to store intercontinental ballistic missiles.

While the vast, hardened underground tunnel system offers a potential second-strike capability in the event of nuclear war, Dean Cheng, an Asian studies expert at the Heritage Foundation, told Insider that “it is also a way of deceiving your adversary to make sure that they have no idea how many of anything you have.”

In the case of Yulin Naval Base, submarines are most vulnerable at dock, so hiding them in underground tunnels, as has been done in the past, offers a certain degree of protection from potential adversaries, such as US Navy forces patrolling nearby.

“The benefit of underground berthing is it prevents overhead sensors like visual or electronic intelligence satellites from tracking submarine deployments to cue other surveillance and tracking assets like US submarines, patrol aircraft, and surface combatants,” Bryan Clark, a former US Navy officer and defense expert at the Hudson Institute, told Insider.

“These kinds of cues are important for US and allied intelligence gathering against adversary submarines, since they can be hard to find once they get to sea and submerge,” he added, explaining that Yulin’s location at the southern end of Hainan allows PLAN submarines to access deeper waters more quickly than other bases might permit…..more here

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