U.S. intelligence agencies have monitored a huge expansion in China’s production and testing of ballistic and cruise missiles over the last decade, in what senior Trump administration officials and outside military analysts call a military buildup unprecedented in human history.

Satellite images taken by U.S. intelligence and declassified in the last week, for presentation to officers at the NATO military alliance, tell the tale in a juxtaposition of two photographs of the same military parade held in China a decade apart. Both photographs, attributed to Digital Globe, show the same stretch of Tiananmen Square in Beijing as the country staged its annual National Day festivities on October 1.

In the 2009 event, the segment of the military parade that was devoted to the display of missiles took up .48 kilometers, or just under one-third of a mile. In the declassified imagery from the 2019 parade, the missile segment of the parade can be seen extending for longer than two-and-a-half miles: an expansion of nearly tenfold…

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