I would question that assertion. The number of large scale wars between countries has certainly fallen in the past 75 years (and was falling before then too), and the number of deaths from war has also fallen dramatically, but the number of wars and state-based conflicts has gone up significantly - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-conflicts-and-i... - and back in 2014 there were only 11 countries on Earth not officially involved in at least one war - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/world-peac...
Globally, the conflicts we have are smaller and less visible, and kill fewer people, but we have less peace now than we've ever had.
Everyone will be losers but as things currently stand, China would loose the most.
Furthermore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Great_Wall_of_Chin...
(A variant of a worst case I haven't even considered before is a full nuclear Armageddon, and then Command and Control survives to take nuclear potshots for years afterwards. For instance if one party has still substantial conventional forces but the other manages to from time to time scrounge up another nuke and launch it.)
I could see them have more ICBMs than apparent, but successful SDI I don't think is possible, not against nuclear strike submarines in any case.
Moving to a smaller country, I don't know how I would feel in World War just because of population numbers and physical location. Given the arguments we can see between humans in U.S. states, and knowing how trivial it truly is to something like the ideologies of the CCP... I fully expect serious global conflict within my lifetime. That's the one thing I do atleast think I feel safer with being in the slightly rural MidWest than a smaller country....
Maybe this is getting away from the point of things. But fuck. I've experienced a lot of physical pain in life from my body falling apart, but in my mind, the horrors that could be experienced in war makes it seem like nothing. I'd just not like to die in a horrible way because of dumb fucking shit. However, that's probably stupid of me seeing as how that's how most of human history has been.