“China is expected to have between 75 and 100 long-range nuclear missiles pointed at the United States by 2015, roughly quadruple the current number, according to a CIA report released Wednesday,” The Washington Post reports.

Many of those intercontinental ballistic missiles will be on mobile launchers, helping China maintain a nuclear deterrent against the vastly larger U.S. missile force, says the report, titled “Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat Through 2015.”

Echoing earlier intelligence estimates, the report also says North Korea and Iran will probably have long-range missiles capable of reaching the United States by 2015. These assessments have been used to justify U.S. plans for multibillion-dollar missile defense systems capable of shooting down a limited ICBM attack on the continental United States.

Maybe the whole missile defense boondoggle is worth exploring after all; to be honest, I’ve been a persistent skeptic of that particular project (not that I didn’t think it would work — I’d never be so foolish as to doubt the technical genius of this country’s scientific and engineering visionaries — it’s just that I didn’t think we needed the damn thing; I guess I was drunk on all that post-historical, Fukuyama bubbly…), but what I’ve come to realize of late is that the U.S.’s so-called “cultural hegemony” doesn’t extend (unfortunately) to things like exporting our own live-and-let-live ethic to countries under totalitarian rule. Of course, we would never launch an unprovoked nuclear attack on another country, but Iran? North Korea…? Given the chance…?

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