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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The US is headed that way. After we lose the first war with China, over Taiwan,[1][2] the decline will accelerate.

[1] https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/03/us-will-lose-fast-i...

[2] 2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman, Admiral James Stavridis USN

I’m not a military strategist, but I don’t understand. That article you cited about America should w say the US would lose a battle with China ?

What about all the ICBMs, long range bombers, subs etc etc which would be used if something like that happened ?

What happens when Chinese intercept and disable all our sub's nuclear launch radio signals coming from Alaska, and all our subs become worthless?

You don't think the subs have a way to launch without a radio signal?

You don't think we have some kind of satellite like to them?

The submarines establish that the US has collapsed as a result of nuclear war with China, and execute their orders to retaliate. That’s the entire point of ballistic missile submarines.

I gather that the point of the article was that we might 'lose' in the sense that we couldn't prevent them from taking Taiwan. That's plausible, it's sitting right off the coast of China. And I doubt we'd be willing to initiate a nuclear strike to prevent it from happening.

But China is a very long ways from being able to try and take on the US directly anywhere near North America.

The strategy described is that China takes Taiwan very quickly, and the US can’t stop them. Then it’s up to the US to choose how to retaliate.

They won’t be able to undo the invasion, and there’s no threat to the US directly. So there’s not much incentive for terrible retaliation.

The US might prefer to keep its promises to Taiwan, but at that point it would be choosing to let that go, or escalate into war with a nuclear power.

You think China is going to use biological weapons to conquer Taiwan? I mean, why not just throw a few nukes in too?

> I mean, why not just throw a few nukes in too?

Perhaps they'd want to keep the existing infrastructure for themselves? That's hard to do if you turn Taiwan into a pool of lava...

It's not as though the chip fabs just run themselves... biological warfare would destroy any community of humans.

China is not ideologically able to turn Taiwan into a pool of lava. It's a Chinese province populated by Chinese people. They can take control, they can suppress it brutally, but anything that might suggest they value the general run of people living there less than they value the people living in Jiangsu is a nonstarter.

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