They store warheads, launchers and missiles separately.
We can preempt them at will with a single Trident boat.
Counterforce.
No, they will never try to sink a US carrier.
[They store warheads, launchers and missiles separately.
We can preempt them at will with a single Trident boat.
Counterforce.
No, they will never try to sink a US carrier.]
What they have in their underground facilities is anybody’s guess. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Great_Wall_of_China My take is that anyone who nukes China had better be prepared to kill every last one of them. Because nuclear retribution is only a matter of time. A president willing to kill 1.3 b people over the deaths of 5,000 in a conventional attack and risk the deaths of over 100m Americans? I think that’s a stretch.
I would certainly agree if we pre-empt them when they are at a such a low state of readiness, but I doubt that is a very likely scenario. In a conventional shooting war with the US, wouldn’t one expect them to be at a much higher alert status, with warheads mated to launchers and at least most, if not all, of their road-mobile ICBMs dispersed? If that’s the case, would we have the capability to reliably destroy that force in a pre-emptive strike?
Also, while I tend to agree that they probably have no interest in starting a shooting war with a nuclear power with the ability to threaten them with assured destruction, didn’t they do exactly that in 1969?