Remarkable. You appear to be either negligently or willfully ignorant of the extreme vulnerability of the low-alert U.S. strategic deterrent posture to a pre-emptive first strike. Follow the trends. Four to five years downstream, the Chinese may have 20 JL-2 subs. Or even false-merchantmen with their SLBMs loaded in VLS tubes. (This was once a deterrent concept the US explored). Meanwhile, we will have gone further down the DE-Preparedness route. You falsely assume that there will be any 'boys and girls in the silos and subs' with keys to turn. The U.S. has no Looking Glass flights currently running. The U.S. is in a complete stand-down as far as launch on warning. Indeed the policy remains to launch only after their strike has landed. So much muscle and sinew has been atrophied, deactivated or cancelled, that going back to that high-alert posture will be seriously non-trivial.
And clearly, the political attitude of GWB himself on these issues borders on the cavalier treason of Clinton himself. His unilateral reductions of our retaliatory missile force to less than 1600 warheads will mean that there are just too few launch systems to survive a dedicated JL-2 attack launched from 400 miles off the coast with depressed-trajectories (which may well have been tested in that mode, I have no reason to believe you claiming the contrary, nor should you believe yourself, since this testing is so easily implemented...e.g., the Russians have done so with their missiles). Their Mirv warheads targetting each of the paltry remaining U.S. strategic assets that Bush/Rice have left us.
If the accuracy is good enough (in the depressed mode), (still to be shown, of course) they can credibly destroy the missiles in their silos. The bombers also already cut in half, and also on virtually zero-alert preparedness, with no planes ready on the flight lines, will not be able to scramble fast enough on warning before destruction. Clearly the Chinese accuracy is good enough for that. NORAD, and Space Command can each be taken out with a few shots of the larger warheads. The sole basis for our having any retaliatory capability whatsoever will then rest with the at-sea Trident submarines and our carriers. GWB has been directing Rumsfeld to save money and go down to ONE Trident sub at sea. And ordered further reductions in the fielded totals pursuant the stupid Moscow Treaty. The in-port Tridents (all conveniently bunched up in Walla Walla) will die. That leaves one Trident. They may be hoping that with just ONE submarine they can learn to do as we do in our HUK techniques, and quietly trail it as it leaves port in Walla Walla. If so ( a big if, but then look at the improbable, yet undeniable technical espionage successes already displayed by them), then a nuclear torpedo ends that Trident.
Which leaves, if we are lucky, at-sea maybe 4 or 5 U.S. Carriers in the Pacific or Indian oceans. The Chinese may be mistaken, but from their literature, they appear to be hoping that they can target the carriers beyond the South China Sea with their IRBMs with satellite-based radar 'painting' of the ships, and either destroy or degrade them with a near-nuclear strike.
The long and the short of it is, I would maintain that we should take steps to reverse trends initiated by GHWB/Clinton/GWB. Instead of simplifying....we need to complicate the issues for a Russo-Sino first-strike threat, we make it inviting to their war planners. Better to deter it in the first place by doing those things, whether marginally more expensive or tedious, so that we are prepared for the worst-case. We will have the proof of their intentions or at least their threatened intentions, if they do dramatically deploy 250-300 of the JL-2s or improvements thereon.
With the slow U.S. political/military reaction time, it is always good to have then thought through a proper response well ahead of time if it calls for deployments of new defenses. In this case, clearly an NMD with 360-degrees azimuth would be a dramatic discouragement to Russo-Chinese schemes. Note just how vociferous were their (and their ancillary International Socialist allies) objections to our even inching up to that objective capability. This is the one potentially bright spot in the future trends of the GWB posture. Hence you can count on the Chinese to HEAVILY finance the campaign of Hillary in 2004, so that the NMD program gets either defunded, or neutered in some other way.