HONG KONG — China is moving ahead with the development of a new and more capable generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched missiles, giving it a greater capability to hit targets in the United States and to overwhelm any missile defense systems, military analysts said this week.

Larry Wortzel, a former U.S. military intelligence officer and retired Army colonel who is now a commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a panel created by Congress, said that China was developing the capability to put as many as 10 nuclear warheads on an ICBM plus a series of dummy warheads. The dummy warheads would have heat and electromagnetic devices designed to trick missile defense systems into perceiving them as being as threatening as the actual warheads, he said.

“The bigger implication of this is that as they begin to field a force of missiles with multiple warheads, it means everything we assume about the size of their nuclear arsenal becomes wrong,” he said.