The Reading Warehouse

Threat inflation tends to lead to poor policy outcomes. When it comes to China's nuclear arsenal, it's important for American leaders to accurately understand the nature of the problem. Nuclear risks between the United States and China manifest differently than those of the past U.S.-Soviet nuclear competition, or that of the United States and Russia today.
Concerns regarding nuclear use in the U.S.-China context stem from, among other things, mutual mistrust and the manipulation of risk below the nuclear threshold, largely from qualitative force posture and strategy choices each country has made. Quantitative factors - most importantly the size of China's nuclear arsenal - are less pressing.
It is important to analyze the cognitive biases of political leaders to forecast future scenarios. However, a character of a leader is only one of the factors to affect scenarios. The history looks drifted by personalities of leaders but is moved by the almost inevitable probability. It is required to seek and find a future scenario with high certainty among a variety of scenarios that will change over time.