your supposition that the Chinese nuclear threat will be defeated by covert destruction of these subs, is a fantasy.
They are building a huge first strike capability which includes mobile icbm’s in thousands of miles of tunnels.
Note also the current need to place these subs off N Korea means the Chinese will let nothing happen to N Korea.
Eh, the way the author uses “First strike capability” is not the way professionals in the field use the term.
ANY nuclear weapon is technically a “first strike capability” in the way Fisher uses it.
The couple dozen ICBMs that China first fielded during the Reagan administration were a “first strike capability” because they could reach the US, and if they wanted to they could ready them and launch them, and take out several US cities, and there’s nothing we could do to stop them (and not much we could do now to stop them).
Of course, we could still annihilate Chinese civilization in a second strike response.
What pros USUALLY mean by “first strike” capability is an ability to almost completely disarm an opponent preventing a second strike...meaning it might MAKE SENSE for a non-crazy leader to launch a first strike.
Even when all the Jins and JL-2s and tunnel-based ICBMs are fielded by the Chinese, they still have ZERO capability to disarm the US.
The hundreds of warheads on undectable US SSBNs at sea would still end Chinese civilization in a second strike.
I said nothing about their nuclear capability. That is a very different equation. It is also unlikely they would use a nuclear strike against their neighbors, with the possible exception of Japan, who could very rapidly assemble its own nukes.
To date, the Chinese effort has been to extend their territorial waters to the coasts of all their neighbors, declaring ownership of all the islands and resources within. But the purpose of doing this is to conform to international standards of resource exploitation, weirdly enough.
Their methods have been aggressive, but gradually aggressive, shouldering out their competition instead of getting too blatant about it. And this seems to be their historical pattern.
If you look at their submarine fleet, much of it is coastal, brown water type. They can only substantially use their more advance submarines to be troublesome to their neighbors. And the US navy in the western Pacific.
http://www.strategypage.com/fyeo/howtomakewar/databases/submarine_database/submarines.asp