Hacker News Reader

Comment by hourislate | Hacker News Reader

About 18-20 years ago I remember reading a thread where a poster basically said (as a counter to China) that the US has developed a blight that could basically wipe out all the rice in the world. It would be deployed via Mosquito and according to the poster had the ability to spread quickly and leave over 3 billion people without their main staple of food. Not a single shot would need to be fired. Within 6 months half the worlds population would be gone.

I figure a day where this will be a reality is completely possible if not already.

Quite disturbing....

View on HN

That betrays a basic misunderstanding of both economics and China. Firstly, rice is the staple food of _southern_ China; northern Chinese eat wheat noodles and buns as stables. Secondly, China is developed enough now that the average person is not so poor that they couldn't afford to feed themselves enough non-rice food to avoid starvation for the 6-12 months necessary for the rice to be replaced with a different crop (and for the truly poor, the government could just ration the wheat).

Look at it another way: wheat is the staple food of western countries, but how many westerners would starve to death if all the wheat products suddenly disappeared from stores? Very few, given the ample supply of rice, corn, potato and dairy-based alternatives.

> Within 6 months half the worlds population would be gone.

Within 6 months, a country with nuclear weapons is forced in a desperate situation. What could go wrong?

Is there really a point to such a scenario between nuclear powers? It doesn't make much sense to me. The US might as well launch all its warheads from the start.

Of course, it's about plausible deniability and logistics: You can't launch your nuclear arsenal and then look deadpan at the camera and shrug your shoulders. But killing a third of the world's population with insects sounds so unbelievable that there would be skepticism even if the President held a news conference and claimed responsibility right into the microphone.

Who cares about deniability or skepticism in an apocalyptic scenario as described? Do you really think cool heads would prevail if China was put in a such a situation? Chaos, and desperate people would be the result, with a nuclear arsenal in the mix. And they would, most likely, blame whoever they want, proofs and rationality be damned.

Keep in mind, I don't deny that the military can find uses for what the article describes. But, to go from this, to deliberately provoking WW3 by massively launching such a weapon on China is suicide. It would provoke a counter-attack, guaranteed, no matter the political arguments.

Plausible deniability is fine when the targeted countries can't counter-attack, or the matter is relatively minor. But, directly against China and with world-ending repercussions? No way.

Maybe. But maybe not. Stranger things have happened in history, and they really have. I'm going to go out on a limb here with some wildly uninformed speculation, but the people running the show in the PRC aren't normies. They are people that have clawed their way to the top of a ruthless pyramid of power. Or were raised from birth by people who clawed their way to the top. Either way, they're at the top for a reason. Look at China's communist history, and you'll see a fairly consistent, running theme of systemic paranoia -- sometimes thinly-veiled, sometimes outright -- that occasionally spirals into non-trivial political purges. History is full of examples of plot twists even more bizarre-sounding than this, and I am far less certain than you are that the perceived perpetrator(s) of such a targeted depopulation event would be so clear cut to the Politburo.

All that aside and more importantly, after one really bad crop failure, the PRC will have more existential problems on its plate than who gets the blame.

> You can't launch your nuclear arsenal and then look deadpan at the camera and shrug your shoulders

https://media.giphy.com/media/l4FGuhL4U2WyjdkaY/giphy.gif

If there was a huge famine in China then the US (and the whole world) would feel obliged to pour enormous resources in to help mitigate the effects.

Corporations already have significant control over agriculture, especially seeds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com