No, China’s nuclear weapons are not just as lethal as the USA! They are just as powerful as on a bomb-to-bomb basis, but there is a far cry in the number of TOTAL nuclear weapons each! The last data I saw was that the US had approx. 12,500 and Russia had 12,7000. China, who started late in the “bomb” business, has roughly 525. Estimates are that it would take China 20 years to reach the levels of the US and Russia. But we and Putin will not tolerate China adding to their arsenal. They are at the number they will always have.

It is not a question of the US being a greater existential threat but is US presence in Taiwan an existential threat. The Soviet Union was indeed an existential threat to the US during the cold war, but Soviet presence in Cuba was no more a threat than their nuclear submarines lurking off our coast, just like ours were to them. That was how the game was played – MAD. US presence in Taiwan is not in-and-of-itself an existential threat; what it represents is. But the existence of US and China, with their two different philosophies, is an existential threat to each other with or without Taiwan.

When South Viet Nam fell there were communist repercussions in adjacent Laos and Cambodia, and as we know ultimately they did not align with the Soviets. So while it might have happened, the dominoes did not fall.

Hitler was allowed the Rhineland, and Austria fell; Austria, and western Czechoslovakia fell; western Czechoslovakia, and the rest of Czechoslovakia fell. Then Poland. So in that case the dominoes did fall.

Mark Twain once observed that he once saw a cat jump on to a hot stove and the cat never jumped onto a hot stove again – but he never jumped on to a cold stove either. We need to discern whether the Chinese leaders are more analogous to Hitler or Ho Chi Minh. And as a country we need to decide if we will live up to President Kennedy’s idealistic promise that “we shall pay any price…to assure the survival and success of liberty.”