Why the worry about China's growing military power? It is still minuscule compared with the US, which spends as much as all the other countries in the world combined. The worry over China's homemade Stealth bomber, its building of aircraft carriers and destroyers and its deployment of more submarines have become, in some quarters, emotionally charged.
In October 1964, China exploded its first nuclear weapon. Then China went on to build a small, unsophisticated and highly vulnerable nuclear armoury. For more than three decades, its modernisation of the force was slow and gradual. China believed that even if it was subject to a massive attack, at least one of its rockets would get off the ground and devastate Los Angeles or Moscow.
This was all Mao Zedong wanted and, after him, Deng Xiaoping. Both thought there were better things to do with China's money. Both viewed nuclear weapons as tools for deterring an attack and countering coercion, nothing more. Even after the two died, this remained China's strategy.
Only in the mid-1990s did China seek a second strike ability which would make it able to withstand an attack and retaliate with all its force. It is building rockets that can be moved by trucks along the road, or by railway, making them very hard to detect. It is building a nuclear-powered submarine force.
Some scholars, military officers and US congressmen are arguing that China is moving towards a war-fighting strategy. Others point to the challenge that these new forces may pose to crisis stability.
Much of this debate resolves around whether China is pursuing minimum deterrence (as before) or limited deterrence. Minimum deterrence means threatening the lowest level of damage to prevent an attack with as few nuclear weapons as possible. Limited deterrence demands a war-making machine able to inflict a high level of damage on the enemy at every rung on the ladder of escalation. Most experts believe China's doctrine still remains minimum deterrence.
How many nuclear weapons are in China's arsenal? The best estimates suggest that today it has perhaps 120 - not many more than Pakistan. And Pakistan appears to be still building up its arsenal.
Between 1964 and 1996, China conducted only 45 nuclear tests, less than 3 per cent of the number carried out by the Soviet Union and the US. It also says it adheres to the doctrine of 'no first use', unlike the US. Moreover, the experts say that China does not have plans to significantly expand its arsenal.
In more than two decades, China has not substantially changed its nuclear strategy or its force structure. Chinese leaders have long believed that, once mutual deterrence was achieved, a larger arsenal would be costly, counterproductive and self-defeating. Besides that, they believe they are unusable on the battlefield. Chinese leaders, unlike America's and Russia's, have never equated the size of their arsenals with China's national power or prestige.
The worriers have not studied these facts. There is only a little smoke and no fire.
Jonathan Power is a London-based journalist