China has no plans to escalate war to a nuclear level

James Mulvenon, Vice-President of Defense Group, Inc.¹s Intelligence Division, 06

RAND Corporation, "Chinese Responses to U.S. Military Transformation and Implications for the Department of Defense", 2006, http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2006/RAND_MG340.pdf,

When Chinese strategists contemplate how to affect U.S. deployments, they confront the limitations of their current conventional force, which does not have range sufficient to interdict U.S. facilities or assets beyond the Japanese home islands. Nuclear options, while theoretically available, are nonetheless far too escalatory to be used so early in the conflict. Theater missile systems, which are possibly moving to a mixture of conventional and nuclear warheads, could be used against Japan or Guam, but uncertainties about the nature of a given warhead would likely generate responses similar to the nuclear scenario. According to the predictable cadre of “true believers,” both of the centers of gravity identified above can be attacked using computer network operations (CNO). In the first case, the Chinese information operations (IO) community believes that CNO will play a useful psychological role in undermining the will of the Taiwanese people by attacking infrastructure and economic vitality. In the second case, the Chinese IO community envisions CNO effectively deterring or delaying U.S. intervention and causing pain sufficient to compel Taipei to capitulate before the United States arrives. The remainder of this section outlines how these IO theorists propose operationalizing such a strategy.
No impact - China lacks critical military capabilities to challenge the U.S

Richard A. Bitzinger, Senior Fellow with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies Monterey Institute, 08

Survival, "Why East Asian War is Unlikely", 5 December 2008, PDF

Overall, most Western assessments agree that the PLA has made considerable progress over the past decade in adding new weapons to its arsenal, and that China has noticeably improved its military capabilities in several specific areas - particularly missile attack, power projection over sea and in the air, and information warfare. Most predict that Chinese military power relative to its likely competitors in the Asia-Pacific region - especially Taiwan - and the United States will continue to increase significantly over the next ten to 20 years. There are, however, some striking differences of opinion when it comes to interpreting the significance of these hardware developments. Many Western analysts assert that the PLA continues to suffer from considerable deficiencies and weaknesses that limit its ability to constitute a major military threat: in spite of all its efforts, China is still at least two decades behind the United States in terms of defence capabilities and technology. In particular, the PLA still lacks the logistical and lift capacity - both by sea and by air - for projecting force much beyond its borders. China also lags far behind the West in areas such as C⁴I architectures and surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. Some therefore argue that China's current rearmament programme is an incremental, long-term modernisation process that must be understood in the context of competing force-modernisation activities taking place among China's likely rivals.

(Robert, 5/10/11, War Between China, U.S. Not Likely, http://www.afcea.org/signal/signalscape/index.php/2011/05/10/11510/)

[Tom Paulson, blogger for Humanosphere and senior writer for National Public Radio; “Which four diseases face total eradication? Bill Foege predicts extension of smallpox success;” published 6/28/2011; http://humanosphere.kplu.org/2011/06/bill-foege-on-disease-eradication-on-the-world/)

[Michael Lind, policy director of the New America Foundation's Economic Growth Program; “So Long, Chicken Little;” published in Foreign Policy, March/April 2011; http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/22/so_long_chicken_little?page=0,8)

[Center for Responsible Nanotechnology; “Medical Benefits of Molecular Manufacturing;” published 2008 in CRN Research: Overview of Current Findings; http://www.crnano.org/medical.htm)

But whatever type, viruses evolve in two fundamental ways. The first, called antigenic drift, is gradual but constant. A single virus can produce 1 billion offspring in a single day. This profligate rate is essential. Viruses need maximum numbers to boost their chances of finding hosts and ensuring survival. Such rapid replication guarantees that mistakes will be made, that tiny mutations in gene copying will result in new viral strains not recognized by immune systems. For small viruses such as influenza or hepatitis C, antigenic drift is critical to helping them evade detection during infection.

"Fragile environment" has become a welded phrase of the modern lexicon, like "aging hippie" or "fugitive financier." But the notion of a fragile environment is profoundly wrong. Individual animals, plants, and people are distressingly fragile. The environment that contains them is close to indestructible. The living environment of Earth has survived ice ages; bombardments of cosmic radiation more deadly than atomic fallout; solar radiation more powerful than the worst-case projection for ozone depletion; thousand-year periods of intense volcanism releasing global air pollution far worse than that made by any factory; reversals of the planet's magnetic poles; the rearrangement of continents; transformation of plains into mountain ranges and of seas into plains; fluctuations of ocean currents and the jet stream; 300-foot vacillations in sea levels; shortening and lengthening of the seasons caused by shifts in the planetary axis; collisions of asteroids and comets bearing far more force than man's nuclear arsenals; and the years without summer that followed these impacts. Yet hearts beat on, and petals unfold still. Were the environment fragile it would have expired many eons before the advent of the industrial affronts of the dreaming ape. Human assaults on the environment, though mischievous, are pinpricks compared to forces of the magnitude nature is accustomed to resisting.

As a critical input into the existence of humans and of life on earth, biodiversity obviously has a very high value (at least to humans). But, as with other resource questions, including public goods, biodiversity is not an either/or question, but rather a question of “how much.” Thus, we may argue as to how much biodiversity is desirable or is required for human life (threshold) and how much is desirable (insurance) and at what price, just as societies argue over the appropriate amount and cost of national defense. As discussed by Simpson, the value of water is small even though it is essential to human life, while diamonds are inessential but valuable to humans. The reason has to do with relative abundance and scarcity, with market value pertaining to the marginal unit. This water-diamond paradox can be applied to biodiversity. Although biological diversity is essential, a single species has only limited value, since the global system will continue to function without that species. Similarly, the value of a piece of biodiversity (e.g., 10 ha of tropical forest) is small to negligible since its contribution to the functioning of the global biodiversity is negligible. The global ecosystem can function with “somewhat more” or “somewhat less” biodiversity, since there have been larger amounts in times past and some losses in recent times. Therefore, in the absence of evidence to indicate that small habitat losses threaten the functioning of the global life support system, the value of these marginal habitats is negligible. The “value question” is that of how valuable to the life support function are species at the margin. While this, in principle, is an empirical question, in practice it is probably unknowable. However, thus far, biodiversity losses appear to have had little or no effect on the functioning of the earth’s life support system, presumably due to the resiliency of the system, which perhaps is due to the redundancy found in the system. Through most of its existence, earth has had far less biological diversity. Thus, as in the water-diamond paradox, the value of the marginal unit of biodiversity appears to be very small.

What is suggested by geologic history is that the world has more biodiversity than it ever had and that it maybe overdue for another major extinction. Unfortunately, today many scientists have too narrow a view. They are highly specialized. They have no time for geologic history. This appears to be a problem of inadequate education not ignorance. What is abundantly clear is that artificially enforcing rigid biodiversity works against the laws of nature, and will cause irreparable damage to the evolution of life on this planet and maybe beyond. The world and the human species may be better served if we stop trying to prevent change, and begin trying to understand change and positioning the human species to that it survives the inevitable change of evolution. If history is to be believed, the planet has 3 times more biodiversity than it had 65 million years ago. Trying to sustain that level is futile and may be dangerous. The next major extinction, change in biodiversity, is as inevitable as climate change. We cannot stop either from occurring, but we can position the human species to survive those changes.

On the other hand, critics argue that some experts have oversimplified the significant technical challenges to building catastrophic biological weapons and have overestimated the abilities of terrorist groups to overcome them. "How do you kill a lot of people? There, you've got to get involved with airborne, deadly pathogens such as Bacillus anthracis spores, and that's fairly technically demanding to do," Zilinskas said. Potential difficulties, experts say, include obtaining proper equipment and an appropriate strain of pathogen; storing and handling the pathogen properly; growing it to produce a greater quantity; processing it to develop the desirable characteristics; testing it; and dispersing it. A terrorist group would need to have suitably educated and knowledgeable people, and sufficient time and freedom from government scrutiny, to do the work, they say. Potentially the toughest challenge, experts say, is "weaponization" -- processing an agent to the point that it can resist environmental stresses, survive dissemination, and increase its ability to infect (pathogenicity) and to harm (toxicity). This is particularly true if the terrorists want to spray the agent, which is a more effective approach for a mass attack than spreading an agent through human-to-human contact. "While collection and purification knowledge is widespread among ordinary scientists, weaponization is obviously a military subject, and much of the knowledge that surrounds it is classified," wrote Danzig, who believes that terrorists nevertheless might be able to develop catastrophic biological weapons. The key difficulty for producing an aerosolized weapon, Danzig said, "would be to produce a pathogen formulation in sizes that would be within the human respiratory range and that could be reliably stored, handled, and spread as a stable aerosol rather than clump and fall to the ground. Mastering these somewhat contradictory requirements is tricky... The challenge becomes greater as attackers seek higher concentrations of agent and higher efficiency in dissemination." Stanford's Chyba agrees on the difficulties of weaponization. "Aerosolization is clearly [a] serious hurdle. I just find it hard, currently, to imagine a Qaeda offshoot -- or, for that matter, any of the current non-state groups that I have read about -- being technically proficient in that."