The New York Times makes a very scary claim here.

The second big change arises from China’s nuclear ambitions. The country’s nuclear expansion is running at an even faster pace than American intelligence officials anticipated two years ago, driven by President Xi Jinping’s determination to scrap the decades-long strategy of maintaining a “minimum deterrent” to reach or exceed the size of Washington’s and Moscow’s arsenals. China’s nuclear complex is now the fastest growing in the world.

This is awful news. The U.S. and Russia certainly have no moral high ground here. They could have proposed to reduce their arsenals to a minimum credible deterrent in exchange for China not expanding theirs. I am not a person of vast intelligence, but I can see that this would benefit the world. You would have to “trust but verify” with a heavy international inspection regime of course, but there is plenty of Cold War precedence and experience with that.

I don’t trust the New York Times (or rather, the spies on their staff masquerading as professional journalists and thereby undermining all credibility of their actual professional journalists), and the paragraph above is not even the main point of the story. The main point of the story is supposedly the U.S. preparing for the possibility of a coordinated attack by both China and Russia. The way this was leaked to the press has a whiff of propaganda to me, but the possibility of three planet-ending nuclear arsenals rather than two is terrible news for the world’s overall nuclear risk whatever the sneaky intentions of this particular article.