Politics & Power Quote by Lee H. Hamilton

A sentence like this is less a prediction than a pressure tactic, the kind Washington veteran Lee H. Hamilton has spent a career deploying with measured restraint. The plainness is the point: no adjectives, no melodrama, just an expanding capability aimed at the most visceral object in American politics - the homeland. It drags a strategic debate out of briefing rooms and into the civic bloodstream.

The specific intent is agenda-setting. By centering “deliver nuclear warheads on American cities,” Hamilton isn’t talking to arms-control wonks; he’s talking to appropriators, committee chairs, and a public that rarely thinks in terms of second-strike stability. “Expanding” does quiet but forceful work: it implies trendline, momentum, and the cost of delay, without claiming inevitability or assigning motives that could be contested.

The subtext is institutional: deterrence is no longer a mostly bipolar script. China’s modernization challenges assumptions baked into post-Cold War defense planning - that U.S. strategic supremacy is durable, that missile defense and conventional dominance can substitute for nuclear parity, that escalation risks remain containable. By choosing cities as the target, Hamilton underscores vulnerability and political consequence. The phrase invites a recalibration of priorities: more funding, different basing decisions, renewed arms talks, harder intelligence questions.

Context matters, too. Hamilton’s authority comes from the sober lane of commissions and oversight, where credibility is built by sounding alarm without sounding panicked. The line functions as a bipartisan warning label: whatever your view of China - rival, partner, threat - the capability curve is moving, and U.S. policy can’t afford to keep arguing in yesterday’s categories.