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Comment by houseatrielah | Hacker News Reader

The next war is Russia-China vs West escalated by China invading Taiwan or N. Korea invading S. Korea. Then maybe it goes nuclear... but the only way to win a nuclear war is to win on surprise attack first-strike -- so maybe there will be a surprise attack nuclear exchange before the invasions.

In terms of Israel, maybe they will annex Gaza, but its not a ww3 thing.

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> the only way to win a nuclear war is to win on surprise attack first-strike

No win: any counterstrike need only be airborne before that 1st strike hits (ignoring submarines).

In your example: NK might be able to strike SK by surprise - short distance, missiles could could cover it in a few minutes.

But in case of NK striking SK, countries allied with SK wouldn't leave NK unpunished. So even if NK's 1st strike were 'successful', it would still be annihilated by the response. If not by SK, then by its allies.

On top of that: not all 1st strike missiles would reach their enemy, hit their target, or manage to destroy all their enemies' missiles.

TLDR; there's no win in all-out nuclear war.

There's hypersonic missiles and in terms of submarines -- we can detect a wobble of some planet a zillion miles away -- maybe there exists a mechanism to detect subs with increasing precision of instrumentation. The definition of "win" for a western democracy may be very different than the definition of "win" for a Communist government.

>There's hypersonic missiles and in terms of submarines -- we can detect a wobble of some planet a zillion miles away -- maybe there exists a mechanism to detect subs with increasing precision of instrumentation

So, does it exist or not?

Such an ability would be totally classified, its just an observation that measuring ability is increasing. Atomic clocks, etc.

Well, just because we improve in one area, it doesnt mean that we improve in this area

NK would bring SK down to NK levels of civilization. I doubt SK has enough weapons and ammunition to fully counter NK. It would run low on ammo quickly. NK is already a post apocalyptic wasteland not much would change if you bombed it to the Stone Age.

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