Adm. Charles Richard, the head of US Strategic Command, said China has a nuclear arsenal that is “inconsistent” with Beijing’s no-first-use policy, a policy the US has refused to adopt. Like most accusations about Beijing’s military, this claim serves as an excuse for the Pentagon to spend more money building its own arsenal.
“China in particular is developing a stack of capabilities that, to my mind, is increasingly inconsistent with a stated no-first-use policy,” Richard told reporters on Monday.
“It’s not where they are, it’s where they’re going,” Richard said. “We’re going to have to move equally as fast in order to pace that threat.” Richard’s comments come after a report from the Pentagon that warned of China’s nuclear capabilities and said Beijing could double its nuclear arsenal by 2030.
Current estimates put China’s arsenal at around 300 warheads, meaning even if they do double the stockpile, it will still be significantly smaller than Washington’s, which is close to 6,000 warheads. Although this number doesn’t seem important to Adm. Richard, who said measuring the stockpile is a “relatively crude” measure of China’s capabilities.
The Trump administration has been using China as an excuse not to renew the New START treaty with Russia. The New START is the last major arms control agreement between the two powers and limits the number of nuclear warheads each nation can have deployed. China has no interest in trilateral arms control agreements since the US and Russia have vastly larger stockpiles.
If the New START expires, the US nuclear weapons budget could skyrocket, and a new arms race will likely begin. Marshall Billingslea, President Trump’s envoy for arms control, said the US was willing to spend its competitors “into oblivion” if a new arms race does start.
The US position is so extremely aggressive that it has made new enemies and prompted them to adopt a somewhat aggressive position. We can now take the lesson that Dr Strangelove here thinks we should, or perhaps there’s another interpretation we could make. He’s concerned that if the US makes an all-out conventional attack on China like our psychos-in-charge are contemplating, China might use their new non-ICBM nukes to sink our navy. It’s very rude of our victims to consider defending themselves, poor offended adminal.
“adminal.” So is that what you get when an Admiral and an animal(skunk?)mate?
If the admiral is right then all help must be provided to China to increase their arsenal to parity with US, thereby reducing the first strike necessity.
The mother of all existential threats is global warming. Everything else is misdirection. Nuclear Winter will stop global warming, so a short exchange may not be the worst thing that could happen. Of course, either way hundreds of millions of us are going to shuffle off prematurely.
China is doing to us what we did to the USSR in the 1980s. Making us go broke trying to keep up with a largely imagined menace.
War is bad for capitalism and nobody is more capitalist than China. The USA needs to get with the program.