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You'll have to forgive if I'm writing all of this quickly and without as much effort as I should- it's just that a lot of people have been responding to me and I'm doing my best to keep up, even though all of this quickly gets into deep rabbit holes, like that 200 page report on nuclear planning that you linked me.
But that's true of anyone, I suppose. Trump doesn't have all day to sit around reading academic papers, and neither did Kennedy or McNamara or any other world leader. We all act in a combination of rational thought and political biases.
Notably, Kennedy and McNamara were in power during the 1960s, a time of considerable fear and backlash against nuclear weapons. As such, they were highly motivated to find reasons to decrease the nuclear arsenal, even while being stepping up the conventional war in Vietnam. This led, in part, to several defeats for the west- the loss in Vietnam, the occupation of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring, and an assertion of Soviet control in Finland. That's a marked change from the 1950s, when the US had a large lead in Nuclear power, and was much less afraid to throw it around.
That second paper you linked seems to be based on the number of "crises" that occur, and draws heavily on the example of Pakistan and India with Pakistan being the weaker power yet instigating crises. I'm not sure I agree we can generalize from that- Pakistan is just an aggressive, unhinged country. But sure, maybe they're correct that having more nukes won't decrease conflicts- I'd still prefer to be on the side with more rather than fewer nukes, if such an event occurred.
In the cold war, nukes were tough to aim and essentially non-interceptable (as well as a strong chance that they might not fire at all). That led to a focus on aiming for cities, and looking for deterrance. But again, technology has changed. Most nukes would not target cities any more, but military targets and especially known missile silos or airfields. So the number of civilian losses would be much lower, and the number of second-strike weapons fired also much lower. The US could potentially decimate China's nuclear arsenal with a surprise first-strike, then shoot down most of the remaining ones fired via interceptors, and the few that get through probably hitting isolated military targets rather than major cities. That's not something I want to see but, if I was China's military, it would have me terrified. Even the vague threat of such a scenario should be enough to make them take notice. Note that, unlike China, the US has never pledged no-first-use, it's always been assumed that it can use nukes whenever necessary.
So I'm trying to strike a balance here. I'm of course not trying to say that the US is now immune from nuclear weapons, or anything like that. But the balance of power has changed there, in a way much more favorable to the US than it has since the 1950s, and we should be aware of that fact.
I do not believe the assessment that McNamara said such things simply in order to justify decreasing the nuclear arsenal is at all justified. That reasoning is entirely ad hoc; you've basically swapped it out for your own ideas about the dynamics of nuclear warfare and geopolitics - and it's an idea that would have to contend with the fact that McNamara presided over an era where the US nuclear stockpile only grew further, not shrunk.
But those operating during the 1950s gave similarly conservative estimates for the amount of warheads that would be needed to ensure deterrence. "Admiral Arleigh Burke, former chief of naval operations, stated in 1957 that a fleet of forty-five Polaris submarines (with twenty-nine always deployed) was enough to ensure deterrence and destroy the Soviet Union." (Though he did say second-strike capability may require more).
I'm officially confused. Please ctrl+f this entire full text of the paper and search for the keywords "india", "pakistan". They appear only in the title of a single citation within the reference list. I'm not sure what your definition of "draws heavily" is, but I don't consider that to be "drawing heavily" on the example of India and Pakistan.
There is no perfect intelligence which enables you to comprehensively target all missile locations a country has, there is no perfect stealth that enables these missiles to reach target before they notice and shoot back (China has many satellites and could easily notice hundreds of launched ICBMs), and there is no interceptor that allows for any kind of comprehensive defence - which is partially why I said that THAAD is not a convincing argument for "overwhelming military dominance", even if it is leaps and bounds superior to the Hongqi-19, an assumption I would not feel comfortable making. Nuclear warfare is in its nature inherently biased in favour of offence, and as it stands there is zero possibility of anywhere close to a comprehensive missile defence of the United States except in the minds of capeshit-prone Amerikaposters.
The fundamental problem is that you can produce missiles far faster and cheaper than interceptors. Interceptors are far more costly and difficult to make, scaling their production up is more difficult than just scaling up production of warheads, and unless their reliability is 100% you need way more interceptors than warheads. At the moment the US missile defense systems are designed and sized for limited attacks from "rogue states" like North Korea, not for the massive arsenals of peer competitors like Russia and China. That's before you get to the topic of MIRVs and other countermeasures, which basically guarantee your city is getting hit out of sheer volume, redundancy and deception (note China has MIRVs).
You seem to think of producing more of these interceptors as a trivial task, but unfortunately it's not. Nuclear engagement is inherently asymmetric. Even if say the US builds 1000 more interceptor systems, an adversary realistically only needs a few hundred extra MIRVs to have a reasonable chance of multiple hitting their targets. And hilariously the interceptors are much more expensive and hard to make. They are cutting edge technology, while a hydrogen bomb is 50s tech and MIRVs are 70s. The second that there's an escalation of hostilities, China is going to be pumping missiles out en masse. It's already doing so in record time in response to the US' attempt to strengthen its defence system, and it's doing so with a much smaller amount of its budget allocated to defence compared to the US - and that's not even getting into how China's production pipelines are more efficient and scalable than the US. The second you build more interceptors, China will have built an order of magnitude more nukes.
I do not think the US could even potentially scrape past a missile exchange with a major nuclear power with minimal losses.
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