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That is not what the Shanghai coopreration organization is. China has no military allies, this is a significant weakness but it is also a significant strength. It means China has okay relations with every country in the middle east, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Israel. The idea that there is a kind of anti western alliance is largely fictitious. This narrative is promoted by both anti Americans (so that their cause does not seem as hopeless as it really is) and by American interventionists (so that their cause does not seem as pointless as it really is).
America is an enemy of Iran because of Israeli lobbying, not because Iran is a Chinese ally.
How many Americans can Russia and China kill? 30 million? 40? 50? 90? It would be the greatest catastrophe in American history by far.
There's always this two-step dance about what exactly the SCO is. I think the legal details are unimportant, since these aren't countries that are going to be follow the exact letter of any treaty. The fact remains that they were cooperating, and Iran was one of very few countries directly helping China, and now they're gone. All China has left is, what, Myanmar and North Korea? Good luck with that. Any country that starts helping them too much because of "Belt and Road" or whatever can easily be "convinced" to change their ways by US military power.
Notice how even your largest numbers still fall far short of total annihilation. The fear during the cold war was that they might kill everyone, with just a few scattered survivors living in underground bunkers. Now the best they could possibly hope for is just massacring some cities, while the US would certainly survive and overwhelmingly destroy them in response.
The idea that the sheer number of nukes a country holds is the most important factor in an engagement is just silly; maintenance is costly and Russia and the US have so many nuclear bombs partially because of Cold War-era posturing. Strategically speaking, you don't actually need 2000+ nukes to do the job properly, it's not about saturation as much as it is having the capacity to hit enough targets to deter attacks. If you have even a nominal amount of nukes and a proper delivery system, that is more than enough. MAD doesn't need to be even close to total, if you wipe out the largest cities in the US the vast majority of its economy is gone in a handful of hours (and note, you'll not only kill people directly but also through the collateral damage such as complete collapse of infrastructure and radiation percolation into the water system).
Note that China has 600+ nukes, which would certainly be capable of levelling large swaths of the US; striking first is incredibly stupid. Theoretically you could remove their second strike capability by attempting an attack on their silos, but realistically you aren't going to be able to identify the locations of every Chinese silo and submarine and target them before China mounts its offence. Even if just 20 of China's most antiquated ICBMs hit the US, that's 50 million dead according to some possible ballpark estimates, how would you feel about 300? China certainly has enough for credible deterrence against the US, and that's largely what its nuclear arsenal appears to be designed for - out of the major nuclear powers, it's the only one that actually maintains an unconditional no-first-strike policy. Even so, of the nuclear powers it's the one scaling up production fastest.
And speaking of missile defence systems, China has the Hongqi-19, which has a reportedly superior maximum operational range (up to 500-600 km) compared to THAAD (200 km). Claiming "overwhelming nuclear dominance" such that it would allow the US to steamroll any country it feels like is premature, to say the least.
I see it less in terms of "winning" the nuclear war, and more in terms of "which side has more freedom of action?" Having more nukes (as well as more ways of delivering them) buys the US considerablly more freedom of action. China is forced to evaluate everything as an all-or-nothing war for survival; the US has considerably more flexibility.
Notably, during the Korean war when we were actively fighting with China, we still didn't dare attack China directly for fear of triggering a nuclear war. Similarly, during the Vietnam War, they were able to supply North Vietnam freely with weapons and support- the US had to go out of its way to avoid hurting China or the USSR. That no longer seems to be the case- as long as we're not actually attacking China directly, the US seems to have considerable freedom of action to do what it wants. We can stop their investments in South America, stop their oil purchases from Iran, ban their tech companies, and even topple governments that they were on friendly terms with. Even if we were to go invade North Korea tomorrow, what do you think China would do about it?
And that's just for now. Despite their considerable advances in many fields of technology, China still lags behind the US in aerospace tech. The Hongqi-19 has never been tested in combat, and does not seem to be particularly more advanced than THAAD. If the US continues to invest in ground based defense like THAAD, plus gets a working space defense working through Golden Dome... China rapidly runs out of options to hurt the US. But I suppose they can just scale up mass production of nukes, like the USSR did in the 80s... how did that work out for them.
I seriously doubt this is the case, and I don't actually think this dynamic shows up in geopoliticking. If MAD is being deployed and the costs of a first strike are far too high on either side, then the "freedom of action" argument clearly fails. You're basically dooming yourself and your people (and many other countries) either way, with a not-insignificant chance of your own death; at the levels of destruction we're talking about here, it's kind of moot. Seriously, I doubt anybody is evaluating this with the geopolitical logic of "Well, 85% of my country is dead and large swaths of it will not be able to be livable for a good long while and there's possibly a nuclear winter going on, but 99.9% of your population is dead! Checkmate."
Even if China fired none of its nukes, which isn't likely, launching 3,700 nukes in their totality to totally decimate the country blows back on the US immediately and in a big way.
Again, the sheer number of nukes does not actually allow you more freedom of action. It's basically threatening an intense no-win scenario where outcomes on every side are so horrific it's unlikely any country would want to escalate to it.
It has, at least on paper, several advantages over THAAD; being not only capable of longer range but higher altitudes and a superior radar system. And Pakistan has announced plans to acquire the HQ-19, so I guess we'll see how it fares in an in-practice scenario. Suffice to say I don't think THAAD is a particularly convincing or central point for your argument about US overwhelming military dominance.
I would argue that it shows up quite frequently, and in fact was at the heart of Cold-war decision making. The acoup article on it was good. Having more nukes, more delivery systems, and also more defense systems, allows us to push the "red lines" forward to control borderline territories. Having fewer, and using them only as a last-ditch resort, means that countries struggle to project force outside their boundaries, as China does today. It's not about evaluating the number of dead, it's about the chance of starting such a war. The USSR in contrast was able to invade prague and dominate eastern Europe, secure that the US would never risk war over some distant city. But now, the calculus is on the opposite foot- there's no way the PRC would risk nuclear war to protect Tehran, or even Pyongyang.
That seems like a rather fear-mongering article, essentially taking all of China's claims at face-value despite a complete lack of tests, while assuming that the US can't do anything in response (eg, using satellites to increase tracking range instead of relying solely on THAAD). It's probably written to encourage more spending on missile defense. But yes, I do agree that THAAD isn't a huge central point for this discussion, it's just one of many weapons systems where the US now enjoys a considerable advantage that it never had before.
I really want to address this reasoning because it's at the core of your argument (I'll move on to other parts of your comment after this has been addressed, because it's by far the bit I take most issue with). I agree that there is, as your article states, an art of "making the best use of the limited area of freedom of action left us by the deterrent effect of the existence of nuclear weapons". But the idea that deterrence can only be achieved by amassing as large an arsenal as possible is not sound, and was the very second-strike capacity which I think I addressed in my previous comments. The following Cold War argument in the article is as such: "Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them."
This logic only holds assuming perfect information is present, but it rarely is. In practice, it is virtually impossible to detect and destroy literally every bomber and submarine in a fairly large geographical area, and second-strikes are pretty much all but guaranteed for a country with any sizeable nuclear arsenal. Once your opponent is able to diversify their holdings via the nuclear triad in any significant capacity it would not be very easy to actually eliminate your opponent's second strike capability wholesale. After your nuclear arsenal grows to a certain level, you do not in practice have to engage in this extremely costly contest in which a greater and greater proportion of public funding goes towards maintaining a nuclear arsenal of gradually increasing size.
It's partially for this very reason that there were several reforms to the planning process that came with a realisation that a bloated stockpile was not necessarily an effective deterrent (and came with steep fiscal costs) that led to the decline in such massive additions, and gradual disarmament. Hell, even McNamara himself noted the diminishing returns inherent in keeping a huge stockpile of reserves. "The point to be noted from this table is that 400 one megaton warheads delivered on Soviet cities, so as to maximize fatalities, would destroy 40 percent of the urban population and nearly 30 percent of the population of the entire nation... If the number of delivered warheads were doubled, to 800, the proportion of the total population destroyed would be increased by only about ten percentage points, and the industrial capacity destroyed by only three percentage points... This is so because we would have to bring under attack smaller and smaller cities, each requiring one delivered warhead. In fact, when we go beyond about 850 delivered warheads, we are attacking cities of less than 20,000 population."
McNamara argued that deterrence was achieved when 25% of the Soviet population could be threatened by their nuclear arsenal. According to that threshold, this study estimates that 51 warheads would deter Russia, 368 would deter China, 300 would deter all of the NATO member countries, 124 the US, and 11 Canada. Meanwhile, at the height of the Cold War the US held like 30,000 warheads. Cold War decision-making isn't something to emulate; it was excessive and inefficient by any reasonable standard, including their own.
Except: "This article tests a core argument of the nuclear competition school regarding the effect of the nuclear balance on the initiation of nuclear crises. With original data on strategic nuclear balance, my statistical analysis shows that having a superior nuclear arsenal than another nuclear-armed opponent does not lead to a reduced likelihood of nuclear crisis initiated by the opponent. These core findings hold after conducting a series of robustness tests with various measures of the balance of nuclear forces."
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.
I'm officially confused. Please command+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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