This is John Bachelor, conversation with colleague Peter Hughes, President of Geostrategic Analysis,

about the nuclear posture review underway in the United States.

The White House and other voices say that it is not to

reorient the review towards China, except there is reason to believe it is.

What is our posture towards China? Are we counter value or

counter force? Those are terms of art from the first Cold War. Counter value means

you go after cities. Counter force means you go after the launch sites.

Peter Hughesi answers very carefully our approach to the orientation and the People's Republic of China's

approach to the orientation.

There's Peter Husey on the nuclear war ahead.

More of this tonight.

We've always been ambiguous though.

You read the nuclear posture of views of every administration since they started writing these things

back in the 1990s we say we do not target

cities which is true we don't we go after leadership we go after weapons

facilities and so forth.

It's against the laws of war and it's it.

They don't value their people, John.

You know, they lose, they've killed millions of their own people to stay in power.

The question is, we're losing people, as Mao said once, a couple

hundred million Chinese would die in a nuclear war. And he said, yeah, we'll make that up in a couple decades. So I mean, it is, we don't hold at risk their people and we don't

explicitly say counter value or counter force but in the material that is released we

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