China Plans on Having 1500 Nukes and be the 3rd Nuke Superpower

 Pretty interesting article talking about the complexities and chaos that occurs in the universe when you have 3 instead of just 2.  For 70 years it’s been America vs Soviets-Russians in nuclear stalemate.  But now what happens if China has hypersonic missiles capable of delivering Nukes all over the world in seconds?  And what if they side with Russia and one day come up with a plan to rid the world of America?  China is not a healthy nation.  Their population is dying.  They may be very dangerous right now because they realize that they have peaked and if they are going to dominate Asia they better start now with Taiwan.

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Isaac Newton was baffled. He was already famous for discovering how gravity holds the universe together and for using that knowledge to predict the movements of celestial bodies, such as the moon’s path around the Earth. Now, by taking the sun’s gravitational tugs into account, he sought to improve his lunar predictions. Instead, it made them worse.

The setback, Newton’s friend Edmond Halley reported, “made his head ache, and kept him awake so often, that he would think of it no more.” Newton felt his defeat so keenly that he recalled it more than once in his old age.

Today it’s called the three-body problem. Famous in science and science fiction for orbital perturbations and chaotic phenomena, it’s recently become a concern of atomic experts and military planners. As Beijing rapidly expands its nuclear arsenal, they warn that the world of atomic superpowers is about to escalate to three from two. The outcome, they add, compared with the Moscow-Washington standoff, now 70 years old, could represent a dangerous new kind of unthinkable.

The looming era could encourage “states to resort to nuclear weapons in a crisis,” Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, recently warned. He cited the natural instabilities observed by physicists and astronomers as a portent.

“We’re at a stable equality,” said William I. Newman, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles, who aidsthe University of California’s management of the Los Alamos weapons lab. “Any departure from that will enhance the instability.”

The looming departure is Beijing’s plan to produce 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, as the Pentagon estimates. If achieved, the rise would represent a fivefold increase from the “minimum deterrent” that Beijing possessed for more than a half-century and would make it a nuclear peer of Moscow and Washington.

Dr. Newman calls the tripolar state “much less resilient” than the bipolar standoff. Even so, three-body theorists see a number of ways that the unthinkable might be avoided.

For instance, Dr. Krepinevich, in a Foreign Affairs article last year, argued that Moscow could fade into economic and strategic insignificance, leaving a strong Beijing and Washington to “navigate their way to a new bipolar equilibrium.” The armed revolt over the weekend in Russia drives home not only Moscow’s weakness but the threat of new instability in an atomic superpower.

On a different note, Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, argued that Washington should aim to deal with the rival superpowers as separate entities.

“I don’t see Russia and China getting together” on atomic strategies, he said. “I see it as two bipolars.” As the Ukraine war rages and Washington has little interaction with Moscow, Dr. Hecker added, now is a good time “to work with the Chinese” in building a two-body relationship.

The main worry of military planners is that Beijing will not only achieve weapons parity with Washington but also form a military pact with Moscow.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/science/3-body-problem-nuclear-china.html