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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

China has an explicit No First Use policy. It also has a nuclear arsenal that is more than 10x smaller than the US.

You might say that China has a secret huge arsenal. The US might have comparable things! And even among the assumed amount of 350 warheads, a lot of damage can be done. The US can do a lot of this as well! There is a nuclear triad on both sides.

Perhaps the No First Use policy is a lie. It is not a law of physics. But it is something. It is a posture that makes it harder for a nation to navigate in some liminal space that makes defensive and offensive posturing look exactly the same.

But the main point of course is that the current state of affairs is already amazingly powerful. What more do people want from their nukes? In what universe is 1500 deployed warheads (out of a stockpile of 5000) not enough to accomplish any sort of strategic objective? There have been many conflicts where 0 has been enough

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> China has an explicit No First Use policy.

China's "policies" last as long as their dictator cares to keep them. At the first sign of change that policy will disappear as well.

Also it's a clear lie as in a fictional world where China mainland was invaded and China was losing the war, it's rather absurd to think they would just sit on their nuclear weapons and not use them.

The US also wouldn't use them in a first strike, but drawdowns have to happen on both sides.

> You might say that China has a secret huge arsenal. The US might have comparable things!

The US cannot. That's the entire point of international inspections. China would have to allow US inspections of their arsenal like is done to the US.

Policy is political and will change if the situation changes. If China was the only one in the world with nukes, of course they'd use them.

China's warheads are also generally higher yield - they're intended for counter-city ops, not counter-force.

The idea with the currently deployed warheads is that even after losses to a hostile first strike, they can still respond and cause unacceptable losses in the enemy. How many nukes does it take to cause 10% fatalities in the USSR? How many in China? And what percentage of those nukes are destroyed before launch, and how many make it though enemy defences to detonate where they should?

And of course, nukes decay.

The point is that we need to maintain that stockpile and knowledge. If the US abandons its nuclear capability, there is nothing to hold others to their no first strike policy.

Definitely. I was likely being too glib in my response here, and wasn't trying to say to throw all the nukes into the trash.

I think that it is possible to maintain an existing set of weapons without trying to continue pushing the envelope towards even more destructive weapons, and that 5000 is a lot/enough.

We stopped trying to get more destructive a long time ago. Modern weapons are smaller than they were at their peak.

If anything I'd image modern research is more interested in things like precision, collateral damage reduction, etc.

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