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Inside China: Nuclear submarines capable of widespread attack on U.S.

They wargame like the US wargames, like virtually every country wargames.

bingo. Not too worried about a nuclear Chinese attack, any more then I did during the USSR's "mutual assured destruction" (MAD) scenario.
Nukes are one weapon system no sane regime would ever use.

The only worry is having them in a non-state actor's hands ( what we call terrorism )
 
Short of having all three simultaneously in firing range of our own submarines, they're going to be able to launch before you can stop them. And you also have to simultaneously take their land-based forces completely by surprise, and destroy 100% of them before they launch. A single missile firing off is a complete failure that places millions of Americans in mortal danger. ABM systems are nowhere near reliable enough to make this a reasonable thing to attempt, and that's leaving aside the whole part about it being mass murder on an unprecedented scale to do this.

Starting a nuclear war with China is suicide. Just like starting a nuclear war with the United States. That's kindof the idea of a nuclear arsenal.

It is almost certainly possible for the United States to destroy the entirety of China's offensive nuclear arsenal if a first strike was launched. The size, distribution, and lack of readiness of Chinese nuclear forces more or less guarantees this. The only real 'x-factor' is whether or not we miss, or if some of our warheads scored only obstructed hits due to intervening mountains. With a larger first strike this possibility diminishes significantly. Either way the probability of a Chinese land based counter-strike is almost non-existent in the face of a US first strike. Indeed our superiority is so great that most analysts believe a first strike could succeed even in the face of Chinese alert as opposed to a surprise strike. This leaves their SSBN fleet which remains shoddy, some of their vessels are not sea-worthy enough to depart Chinese waters, and very small. We monitor them closely and it is astonishingly unlikely that any US first strike would be launched if all three were not accounted for (which they usually are).

An excerpt on their ICBM force: "According to unclassified U.S. government assessments, China’s entire intercontinental nuclear arsenal consists of 18 stationary single-warhead icbms. These are not ready to launch on warning: their warheads are kept in storage and the missiles themselves are unfueled. (China’s icbms use liquid fuel, which corrodes the missiles after 24 hours. Fueling them is estimated to take two hours.) The lack of an advanced early warning system adds to the vulnerability of the icbms. It appears that China would have no warning at all of a U.S. submarine-launched missile attack or a strike using hundreds of stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles"

The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy | Foreign Affairs

American nuclear primacy vis a vis China is a matter of fact.
 
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