What is more interesting is how a serious PhD would even ask the question: "Will China's Deterrent Go To Sea?"

Jeffrey Lewis, Arms Control Wonk, wrote Part One of an article that caught my attention. Dr. Lewis is Director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation, a non-profit public policy institute and think tank in Washington, D.C. that promotes innovative political solutions transcending conventional party lines. So far, so good, right?

His web site's four goals are:

To report items of interest that wouldn’t make it into the New York Times,
Place arms control related developments into context and correct lousy reporting,
To explore the foundations of arms control and other cooperative security strategies, and
Finally, to amuse myself and others.

Still great, right?

His primary question is "... whether China will send the submarine on patrols armed with nuclear weapons."

Interesting that an informed adult would even ask such a seemingly foolish question, right? He does not claim to know the answer and doubts anyone really does. Lewis addresses my utmost (still laughing at this) concerns:

The JIN-class submarine is probably much more capable than the XIA SSBN. How capable is a subject for later this week, but at the very least I don’t expect to hear stories about how sailors couldn’t sleep because the submarine made so much noise.

The crux of this wishful thinking:

If China keeps its new land-based mobile missiles say “assembled and in the garage” with its warheads in another location, then maybe China will also keep its ballistic missile submarines in port and away from US ASW platforms looking for a little training. One could imagine a force of one or two submarines that rarely, if ever, patrol.

Note the word maybe was used. Should we hope that Dr. Lewis is right and surrender the U.S. if his theory turns out wrong? His site allows comments; giving this entertaining thinker great benefit of the doubt, my comment was respectfully civil. One of his goals was to amuse - he succeeded there, but I did not see the word frighten or Taiwan anywhere.