It is a good thing China didn't fall into this trap. The US was just trying to come up with a similar scheme to the Washington Naval Treaty. Which was used by the Western powers in the early XXth century to keep rising powers like Japan in check. They would definitively find a way to make an unequal treaty which favored them.
The article is also bogus like heck. France had a triad until the early 1990s. Back then they had the Hades road mobile land based SRBM. Even back then a lot of military analysts thought it was a useless weapon system because they have a small nation state which would be overrun by the Soviet Union in a matter of days. The proposed scenario was to use the SRBMs to counter a Soviet Union land invasion once the Warsaw Pact forces entered West Germany or even France proper. But in fact French land based missiles could only realistically be used as a first strike weapon. Even then let's face it, even the French aren't arrogant enough to think they could provoke the Soviet Union head on into a conflict and win. The British it's a similar story. At one point they had the Blue Streak silo based IRBM planned which was land based much like the US Atlas missile. Eventually they figured out the silos wouldn't be survivable enough against a Soviet first strike and gave up on the project. Both countries are just too small for a land based deterrent to work properly. You can't easily hide missiles. This is why both the UK and France only retained the other two parts of the triad namely nuclear bombers and submarine launched missiles.
If China gave up on its land based deterrent it would find itself even more outnumbered because their submarine force is still small and growing. The missiles still lack range. Plus the US still has the largest naval surface fleet in the world. Which Chinese leader would be stupid enough to play into their hands and give up on their only deterrent? The rest of the article isn't even worth discussion.
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