My Take | Spiralling US costs require the inflating of China nuclear threat

There is threat inflation, and then there is threat hyperinflation. The United States under Joe Biden has gone full throttle with the latter over China and the nuclear threat.

It seems that the ubiquitous “China threat”, even when coupled with nuclear weapons, is not enough in itself to scare the American public into acquiescence. It now has to be equated with “coordinated” nuclear attacks with Russia and North Korea. Seriously.

The front page story, planted in The New York Times and duly – and uncritically – reproduced in all other major Anglo-American news outlets, reported on an “updated nuclear-weapons employment guidance [to] deter Russia, the PRC [China] and North Korea simultaneously”.

“President Biden approved in March a highly classified nuclear strategic plan … that, for the first time, reorients America’s deterrent strategy to focus on China’s rapid expansion in its nuclear arsenal,” it said. “The shift comes as the Pentagon believes China’s stockpiles will rival the size and diversity of the United States’ and Russia’s over the next decade. [The] revised strategy [is] called the ‘Nuclear Employment Guidance’, which seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from China, Russia and North Korea.”

Questions? How likely will these three countries coordinate a nuclear attack knowing full well it will just mean retaliatory annihilation for themselves as well? Even dictators are concerned with self-preservation. Will China want to tie its own “no first use” nuclear deterrence and therefore survival to what happens in Moscow and Pyongyang?

It’s conceivable that out of desperation, Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un could go nuclear in a Hitler-style Götterdämmerung. But should that ever happen, the first thing the Chinese would do is to run for cover, not join them!