What most people blindingly don’t know is that countries like China are willing to take a hit. They are prepared to take a nuclear hit because they are prepared and sheltered by thousands of miles of underground tunnel networks, which also likely store their nuclear arsenals. America is not. The CCP/PLA doesn’t put much value on human life whereas America does and has less of a stomach for war — which is being strongly proven with overwhelming opposition at this moment as a forced war against the citizen’s will with Syria approaches.
Another website, through historical context has put it quite simply:
Dr. Li, in his Private Life of Chairman Mao, wrote that a few years later, Mao recalled his meeting with Nehru. Hethen realized the meaning of Mao’s words about the atomic bomb:
… it was so hard to accept, how willing Mao was to sacrifice his own citizens in order to achieve his goals. I had known as early as October 1954, from a meeting with India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, that Mao considered the atom bomb a “paper tiger” and that he was willing that China lose millions of people in order to emerge victorious against so-called imperialists. “the atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” Mao told Nehru.
China has many people. They cannot be bombed out of existence. If someone else can drop an atomic bomb, I can too. The death of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.
Nehru had some strong reservations. First of all, for him, “even without war, India would have attained freedom.” He thought that in fact India would have been freed earlier without the war.
Dr. Li added: “In 1957, in a speech in Moscow, Mao said he was willing to lose 300 millions people – half of China population. Even if China lost half its population, Mao said, the country would suffer no great loss. We could produce more people.”Nehru’s second point was that though the US had won the war, they were still unhappy. He could therefore not accept Mao’s argument; he had told him that though a war was bad and therefore should be avoided, still if it comes, one should welcomed it.
China to this day, still pushes forward the agenda of Mao Zedong.
A previous entry covering this can be found here: Mao’s ‘Nuclear Mass Extinction Speech’ Aired on Chinese TV
“Nuclear Weapons Are Cold War Relics.”
Not so. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the era of nuclear competition seemed to be at an end, and the United States and Russia began to get rid of many weapons they had used to threaten each other for more than 40 years. In 1967, the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal peaked at 31,255 warheads, but by 2010, under the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) signed with Russia, the United States had promised to deploy no more than 1,550.
In June of this year, U.S. President Barack Obama announced his intention to go even lower, to around 1,000 warheads — a move that would leave the United States with fewer nuclear weapons than at any time since 1953. What’s more, influential figures around the world, including erstwhile American hawks, have increasingly supported steps toward total disarmament. In his major 2009 address in Prague, Obama committed “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
Nuclear reductions and the heady dreams of abolition are driven in part by a belief that nukes are Cold War anachronisms. But it would be incorrect — dangerous, in fact — to assume that the conditions that have allowed the United States to de-emphasize its atomic arsenal will persist. Nuclear weapons are still the most potent military tools on Earth, and they will remain central to geopolitical competition. They have been relatively unimportant in the recent past not because humanity has somehow become more enlightened, but because we have been blessed with a temporary respite from great-power rivalry.
The Soviet Union’s collapse left the United States as the world’s sole superpower, and America’s unmatched conventional military overawed other countries. Nuclear weapons have not been central to America’s national security for the past two decades because its primary foes — Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and al Qaeda — did not have them. Whatever America’s problems in prosecuting its recent wars, a lack of firepower was not one of them.
But times are changing. Economists predict that China could overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy in the coming years, and international relations theory tells us that transitions between reigning hegemons and rising challengers often produce conflict. Already, China has become more assertive in pursuing revisionist claims in East Asia, confronting America’s allies, and building military capabilities — including anti-ship ballistic missiles and submarines — tailored for a fight with the United States. In September 2012, a dispute between China and Japan over the Senkaku Islands nearly caused a war that could have easily drawn in the United States. Beijing’s contested claims to natural resources in the South China Sea and ever-present tensions with Taiwan could also lead to Sino-U.S. conflict. Even relations with Russia, America’s partner in arms control, are becoming more competitive: The civil war in Syria bears every hallmark of a Cold War-style proxy battle. In short, great-power political competition is heating up once again, and as it does, nuclear weapons will once again take center stage.
The writing is already on the wall. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are modernizing or expanding their nuclear arsenals, and Iran is vigorously pursuing its own nuclear capability. As Yale University political scientist Paul Bracken notes, we are entering a “second nuclear age” in which “the whole complexion of global power politics is changing because of the reemergence of nuclear weapons as a vital element of statecraft and power politics.” Nostalgia for simpler times can be seductive, but the United States needs a nuclear force that can protect it from the challenges that lie ahead.
“It Takes Only a Handful of Nukes to Deter an Enemy.”
Wrong. Advocates of further cuts argue that a secure second-strike capability — the ability to absorb an attack and retain enough nuclear warheads to launch a devastating response — is sufficient for nuclear deterrence. Although “secure” and “devastating” are imprecise terms, many analysts would say that a few dozen submarine-launched ballistic missiles, each with multiple warheads, is plenty because at-sea subs are difficult to target in a first strike and the firepower provided by, say, 200 nuclear weapons is impressive. By their logic, anything more is “overkill” that can be cut with little loss to U.S. security.
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Recently, I methodically reviewed the relationship between the size of a country’s nuclear arsenal and its security. In a statistical analysis of all nuclear-armed countries from 1945 to 2001, I found that the state with more warheads was only one-third as likely to be challenged militarily by other countries and more than 10 times more likely to prevail in a crisis — that is, to achieve its basic political goals — when it was challenged. Moreover, I found that the size of this advantage increased along with the margin of superiority. States with vastly more nukes (95 percent of the two countries’ total warheads) were more than 17 times more likely to win. These findings held even after accounting for disparities in conventional military power, political stakes, geographical proximity, type of political system, population, territorial size, history of past disputes, and other factors that could have influenced the outcomes.
When the United States operated from a position of nuclear strength during the Cold War, it stopped the Soviet Union from building a nuclear submarine base in Cuba in 1970 and deterred Moscow from increasing support to its Arab allies in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars. By contrast, when the nuclear balance was less favorable to Washington, it was unable to achieve clear victories in crises against the Soviet Union — for example, failing to roll back Moscow’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.
In addition, qualitative evidence from the past 70 years shows that leaders pay close attention to the nuclear balance of power, that they believe superiority enhances their position, and that a nuclear advantage often translates into a geopolitical advantage. During the Cuban missile crisis, American nuclear superiority helped compel Moscow to withdraw its missiles from the island. As Gen. Maxwell Taylor, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a memo to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, “We have the strategic advantage in our general war capabilities.… This is no time to run scared.” Similarly, Secretary of State Dean Rusk argued, “One thing Mr. Khrushchev may have in mind is that he knows that we have a substantial nuclear superiority, but he also knows that we don’t really live under fear of his nuclear weapons to the extent that he has to live under fear of ours.”
We see similar patterns in South Asia. When asked years later why Pakistan ultimately withdrew its forces from Indian Kashmir during the 1999 Kargil crisis, former Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes cited his country’s nuclear superiority. In the event of a nuclear exchange, he said, “We may have lost a part of our population … [but] Pakistan may have been completely wiped out.”
This may sound crazy. To most people, “But you should see the other guy” would be scant consolation for losing perhaps millions of one’s fellow citizens. But the truth is that nuclear war might well be more devastating for one country than for the other, even if both sides can inflict “unacceptable” damage. As Cold War nuclear strategist Herman Kahn wrote, “Few people differentiate between having 10 million dead, 50 million dead, or 100 million dead. It all seems too horrible. However, it does not take much imagination to see that there is a difference.”
Full article: “Nuclear Weapons Are Cold War Relics.” (Foreign Policy)
Global Geopolitics 