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Strategic nuclear balance between US and China has apparently changed, and this has been publicly acknowledged by elected US representatives.
Apart from it making a US led escalation of a Taiwan war somewhat less likely, I'm not sure what this means. A ploy to get more money for defense ?
It's a big deal as scholars on twitter whom I follow were reduced from their usual verbosity to posting just .. "what the hell".
I've been seeing rumors from nuclear experts about a Chinese nuclear build-up, but now US house & senate claim it's real.
Would welcome some discussion of this, as I'm sure this is going to have real world implications.
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What scholars? Your first link is to the twitter account of one of the Senators who authored the letter you uploaded posting that same letter.
The relevant Public Law section the Senator references is from the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 and is as follows:
Seems like he and the other committee member signatories think they've gotten something that qualifies as this notice but in classified form and want it in unclassified form so they can publish it. That doesn't get into whether or not China exceeding in number (not necessarily quality) of missiles OR missile launchers OR nuclear warheads in inventory meaningfully alters the strategic picture.
There may be some political aspects to it but it doesn't seem major. Running down the list of letter signatories, Lamborne's district contains Peterson SFB and Schriever SFB which are somewhat interested in ICBMs so more funding to defend against them flows downstream. Rogers' district doesn't seem to have any assets related to ICBMs or China, the closest being maybe Maxwell AFB but nothing based there should really benefit from an increase in anti-Sino-ICBM funding. Fischer representing Nebraska has Offutt AFB which definitely benefits. Infhoe himself has Oklahoma which has a lot of logistics-oriented basing but not much related to strategic or missile defense, though he has a pretty close relationship with the USAF.
Tanner Greer, (@scholars_stage) on twitter.
I don't know how well Greer understands court intrigue. By way of reference this didn't make any waves in the OSINT spaces I keep an eye on (who did at least notice an amusing addition in the FY2023 NDAA). I'd wager a frozen bao that Section 1648 was inserted into the FY2022 NDAA specifically so that the letter signatories could do this song and dance. It's new to FY2022 the closest in FY2021 is Section 1651 and has no analog in FY2023 except maybe Section 5846 but that concerns Iran (and it's not been through the Senate yet). Given how the Congress works, the conditional OR in 1648(a), that legislators and/or their staff based on something that was not the notice specified by 1648(b) believe that they should have been sent one and that Admiral Richard has not sent one I'd tap the breaks on how big a deal it might be.
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