You hear about China, leaping forward a few decades in terms of their own technology. The LA Times had a graphic listing US cities that could be hit by a Chinese missile. Yeah, there is. The breathless reporting here is truly troubling, and I think it's a symptom of a lack of understanding on the part of the reporters, as well as a general lack of understanding on the part of the public. I wish that more people read the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists because then they would know what the facts are, but for you and for your listeners, I'll explain briefly.
China has a really rudimentary nuclear arsenal.
They've had a nuclear weapons capability since 1964. So although people have been comparing it to the situation in 1949 when out of the blue, it appeared, Russia exploded its first atomic bomb, it's not like that at all. Because we just didn't think that they could do it. Truman himself said he couldn't believe that those Asiatics could acquire the bomb. There was this feeling that the Russians were just technologically incompetent, that they couldn't do it, that they must have done it by spying.