China released an official report on Thursday stating that Japan “may already have produced weapons-grade plutonium in secret” and “has the technological and economic capabilities to achieve nuclear armament in a short period of time”. The report assessing Japan’s nuclear threat cited former US president Joe Biden’s direct message to Chinese President Xi Jinping that Japan had the capacity to have nuclear weapons “virtually overnight”. Biden first disclosed the information in an interview with...

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[–] SouffleHuman@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I'm assuming that on the scale and resources of a great power, there's nothing really stopping one from just nuking all potential adversaries in a MAD scenario (whether directly at war or not) to deter against this exact situation. That's why the US and Russia each have thousands of nukes, and why China is also aiming to get over a thousand. Things like international norms or plausible deniability probably fall by the wayside in an existential conflict.