[Orion78]

China's new space launcher is also its newest strategic missile (2/14/03)

[Poohbah]

Fine. They will have, in 2010, a missile roughly equivalent to the Minuteman III...which was deployed 40 years earlier.

By 2015, they may have 75-100 missiles...

And they are likely to have a large-scale civil war raging at the same time, unless they go down as quietly as the XUSSR did.

Read the exhortations the ChiCom leadership makes to the PLA. They stress loyalty. We don't do that; the loyalty of the US Armed Forces is a given. The closest we ever got to their paranoid screechings about how the army must remain loyal to Beijing was telling the troops to ease up on the Monica jokes. The ChiCom leadership is scared.