Mutually Assured Destruction { M.A.D } lives on and resurging now that POTUS and friends suggest CoV-2 was created in Chinese Lab.
...."But China, with only about 300 nuclear warheads, is not yet in the same ballpark as the United States and Russia as a nuclear power. This is one reason why for more than a decade, when U.S. officials have proposed nuclear talks, China’s response has been, in essence, “You’ve got 5,000, we have a few hundred, there’s nothing to talk about until you get down to our level.” With regard to classic nuclear arms control, Beijing has had a point.
.............
...Any single one of these technologies by itself could undermine assured second-strike capabilities. But when you combine the potential consequences of all of them, the numerous possible combinations of preemptive acts, the risk expands exponentially. All told, the impact of this suite of unprecedented emerging technologies risks changing the calculus of nuclear powers. They have already begun to undermine longstanding assumptions about crisis stability, yet there are no codes of conduct, agreed standards, norms, or rules for these technologies.
....Worse, these new risks to strategic stability come at a time of resurgent major power competition and an unraveling of the framework of arms control restraints erected during the Cold War and its aftermath. It is incomplete policy to simply proclaim China and Russia “strategic competitors.” The extraordinary dangers of the current trajectory have greatly intensified risks of miscalculation or inadvertent conflict.
..Inherent in this resurgent strategic competition is that each side seeks dominant capabilities. It is classic security dilemma behavior, on steroids. What one side sees as enhancing its security, the other sees as increased threat. But can the United States, China, or Russia really assume that they have—in operational terms—the advantage in space weapons, hypersonics, cybersecurity, and AI? It’s understandable that the United States, and perhaps others, prefer maximum freedom of action to restraints. But doesn’t such logic repeat the follies of the Cold War? Recall that mindless arms racing led to the United States and the Soviet Union each having 30,000 warheads, before eventually coming to the conclusion that U.S. President Ronald Reagan reached that, “A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.” It took several near-catastrophes before this acknowledgement of mutual vulnerability sunk in.
....In the breakneck quests to dominate new technologies, such as space weapons, hypersonic missiles, glide vehicles, and AI, some harbor a hope of achieving absolute security through outright dominance. But that is a chimera. The harsh reality is that all these new and emerging threats to strategic stability, and to assured second-strike capabilities, result in more mutual vulnerability. In space, for example, the United States had far and away the most dependence on space assets like satellites for military and economic purposes. But China, now with some 300 geostationary satellites, launches more each year than the United States and Russia combined—and, like the United States, its increased military and civilian reliance on space creates new vulnerabilities.
