Leping
28°58'00"N 117°07'00"E
Leping in Jiangxi Province, nearly 600 kilometers [over 350 miles] from Taiwan's capital of Taipei, is the headquarters of the 815th ballistic missile brigade, controlling People's Liberation Army missile units near Taiwan. Leping is the base for a brigade of DF-15 / M-9 [CSS-6] mobile missiles. Leping-based units fired missiles at open ocean areas north and south of Taiwan during 1996 military exercises. The DF-15 missiles are stored at the Jiangxi base, some 200 kilometers away from the Yungan and Nanping bases. Yongan and Nanping have direct railway links with the headquarters of the 815th ballistic missile brigade of the PLA in Jiangxi Province's Leping, and three to four hours would be required to transport missiles from Leping to Yongan via railway.
The facility is headquarters for one of two or three launch brigades, each with up to three launch battalions, subordinated to the Second Artillery Corps 80302 Unit [also known as 52 Base] a Division headquartered in the mountain resort town of Huangshan,
Jiangxi province. The 80302 Unit is the Second Artillery’s most important
unit for conventional long-range precision strikes against
Taiwan.
Photographic Evaluation Report
High resolution imagery is only available from declassified CORONA imagery, which is rather elderly on would only provide negation. As of 08 April 2000 Russian 2-meter resolution KVR-1000 imagery coverage was not available via the SPIN-2 service on TerraServer, nor was archival Space Imaging IKONOS 1-meter imagery available on the CARTERRA™ Archive. The IKONOS archive did contain about half a dozen images of this area, of which four were extremely cloudy. Neither of the two cloud-free images evidently included Leiping, and indeed it is rather difficult to correlate the terrain features in this imagery with maps of the area.
Sources and Resources
- China Targets Taiwan With 2nd Missile Base By Bill Gertz Washington Times December 8, 1999 Page 1 -- The Defense Intelligence Agency has discovered a second Chinese short-range missile base under construction near Taiwan that will significantly increase the threat against the island.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/china/facility/leping.htm
Maintained by Robert Sherman
Originally created by John Pike
Updated Sunday, April 09, 2000 10:55:53 AM
