Norman Haller and Peter Pry explain why mutually assured destruction is endangered and what we could do about it in a post at RealClearDefense:
…U.S. decision-makers should tune out minimalists who ignore the math and advocate replacing the Triad with either a Diad (bombers and submarines only) or, even worse, a Monad (submarines only). Tuned out as well should be MAD proponents who are inattentive to the math and insist that an undefended America is a positive asset.
I predict that the step they list that is most likely to be the focus is the one they say we shouldn’t do: resuming negotiations.
China evidently intends to have full nuclear equivalence with Russia and the US, including a complete Triad with a dozen or so modern SSBN’s. They will have shortly some 400 reinforced silos for heavy ICBM’s, which are likely to be MIRVed.
Also, Russia has recently upgraded its own ICBM’s and SSBN’s. We have various limitation treaties with Russia, but none with China.
Gen. Milley thinks we are entering a tripolar world, but the Russian-Chinese alliance really means a bipolar world, with us at a distinct disadvantage.
Nixon saw the merit in trying to drive apart Russia and China, and it worked for a while. But the price to keep the two communist regimes apart was Taiwan, which we agreed was a province of China in the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué. There have been other communiqués reinforcing that pact, but nowadays the lunatics in State and Defense are trying to abrogate all of them.