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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Are they talking about nuclear missiles? Doesn't "mutually assured destruction" still hold?

Exactly. Nobody knows what the threshold for opening a can of nuclear whopass is. Who's willing to bet a billion lives on it being in a particular spot?

The US and China have far too much common economic interest to go to war short of China doing something so absurdly aggressive that you can't not go to war (e.g. invading Japan) I don't see that happening.

Or maybe miscalculating (I mean here thinking the U.S. isn't willing to go to war but turns out they are) and invading Taiwan. I'm honestly not sure how the U.S. and allies would respond. In my opinion, with the current Chinese administration there's no reason to think they won't continue to act in ways that the West views as aggressive, the question is whether or not we can avoid a war of a misstep. Certainly any military action against Japan (or the Republic of Korea) would guarantee a U.S. military response, but what about other countries? If you're China, it seems like the goal here would be to have Chinese citizens immigrate to countries like Australia and subvert their resolve through their own democracy. We see some of those actions taking place on college campuses in Canada, for example. It's certainly interesting to chat about.

Sadly, Taiwan probably wouldn't get protections from outside nations.

The US is legally obligated to protect Taiwan. Also the US would have to fight even without that because not doing so would be the end of US power in the world. We could NOT afford NOT to fight.

Legal obligations are worth the paper they're written on, when it comes to war between two major world powers. Any decision to retaliate would end up being based on what's best geopolitically for the USA.

Giving up Taiwan, of course, would announce to the world that allies of the US should look for other world power sponsors, because our support is paper thin.

That kind of choice is very costly, and it would take a very unique type of President willing to piss away a century of alliance building.

>The US and China have far too much common economic interest to go to war short of China doing something so absurdly aggressive that you can't not go to war (e.g. invading Japan) I don't see that happening.

Have you forgotten about the incompetent fool that the US elected to be in control of the nuclear arsenal?

> The US and China have far too much common economic interest to go to war short of China doing ....

That's probably what people said in, oh, 1910 about Germany, Britain, and France.

No probably about it. Pre-WW1 was the first era of globalisation, of the oil barons, including the USA and pre-revolutionary China. Quite a few famous names believed there too much economic and trade interdependence to permit another war. Yet once one country started mobilisation war tipped from impossible to inevitable as the web of treaties kicked in.

I'm not aware of anyone who seriously thought that in 1910. The secret network of alliances existed for a reason, after all.

Both points of view existed back in 1910, that war was unthinkable and that war was quite likely. A reflection of today's acceptance of both viewpoints.

Book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

Doesn't sound like it.

From the article: > “As these facilities could be rendered useless by precision strikes in the opening hours of a conflict, the PLA missile threat challenges America’s ability to freely operate its forces from forward locations throughout the region,”

Nuclear weapons probably don't fall under precision strikes.

Then the article is likely talking about anti-ship missiles (AShMs). Every "real" country can overwhelm a naval battle group of any other "real" country with guided missiles. A lot of these missiles can be fired from the shore.

AShMs defenses are very questionable when it comes to supersonic/hypersonic AShMs.

This in specific is what the Navy is betting on lasers for. The 60-kilowatt HELIOS will be on board Arleigh Burke-class by 2021 or sooner.

There is the obvious problem of detecting hypersonic projectiles, but assuming that is "done", then lasers and a lot of them, will be quite effective.

Yeah, as soon as shit hits the fan you can be sure there will be nuclear warheads aimed at any major known military bases, ports and electricity plants of the country. There would be no winner in a total war between nuclear super powers.

Sure China could probably destroy US bases in Asia easily, but what then ?

Mutually assured destruction only prevents war if both parties think the other will take the “tie” of “we both lose, and terribly so” in favor of “I’ll rattle my sabres a bit to show that I mean it, but grudgingly accept a status quo, certainly if you give back a bit of what you took to let me save some face”.

The big question is whether that is still the case if the area fought over isn’t US soil.

Russia in the Ukraine already might be an indication that the answer isn’t an unqualified “yes” anymore. The USA leaving the INF treaty, thus allowing Russia to develop mid-range nuclear missiles, and even threatening to leave NATO are much stronger signals.

One might conclude that the USA isn’t as willing to go to nuclear war for invasions of its partners as it used to be.

No, China has a no first use policy on nuclear weapons and their relatively modest nuclear arsenal matches their rhetoric. China might be willing to risk war over Taiwan or something similar but that isn't the sort of existential stakes you start a nuclear exchange over.

It holds and China only has 300 nukes, which isn't even close to the US and Russian numbers, which both have more experience handling them. Bait-y headline.

> only has 300 nukes

I once did the exercise of finding a list of US cities ranked by size. By the time I got down to number 300, it was some small, insignificant place that only had a population of about three thousand.

300 nukes is well and truly enough.

You aren't hitting cities with nukes, you are hitting launch sites, command centers, AFBs, naval facilities, carrier battle groups, etc.

Sure, in all out war, you will hit a few major cities, but only a small percentage of the nukes will go there.

Fair point nonetheless.

That 'military objectives only" thing was tried in WW2, but found wanting. In bombing against both Germany and Japan, it was found that destroying civilians' homes was far more effective.

Read up on Curtis Le May's methods in Germany, Japan, and then later in North Korea. He was a great proponent of fire-bombing large areas in the centre of cities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo

One fire-bombing raid killed as many people in Tokyo as were killed a few months later in Hiroshima's atom-bombing.

You and I both know the goal of that was to get Hirohito to surrender and that Japan lost most of it strike capability. If strike capability is present, it's a priority.

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

Seems like they just mean cruise missiles. But yea, fixed targets are definitely vulnerable to cruise missiles.

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