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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

The current government is going to weaken Western alliances. China is going to take Taiwan. Japan and South Korea are going to rapidly develop nuclear weapons programs. North Korea will increase the range of its missiles to reliably hit the entire US. The entire Middle East is going to nuclearize, with Iran first and then Saudi Arabia (the Trump white house was trying to arrange this last term, I suppose they'll succeed this time.) You cannot have a world where every single nation has nuclear weapons mounted on ICBMs and not have a war in the medium term.

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If the US goes untrustworthy, every non-poor country on earth will have to start a program

On other hand world where everyone does not have nuclear weapon has been absolutely proven to be utter total failure. We should try one with everyone having nuclear weapons to see if it prevents more wars. Maybe fear of death in the aggressor nations would prevent their evils.

Failure where everyone does not have nuclear weapons looks very different from failure where everyone does. A scenario where everyone has nuclear weapons can only ever fail one time, because after that humanity will not survive to try anything else to "see if it prevents more wars".

It depends on how you define success I guess. The very fact that we're alive to have the option of giving everyone nukes just to see what happens means we've already found a measure of success. If everyone has nukes and they use them it means no more humans, which means no more wars, which I guess can also be seen as a success. World peace at last.

>Japan and South Korea are going to rapidly develop nuclear weapons programs.

Japan would need to amend their constitution for that, and that is simply not happening. They have failed to amend their constitution for much more mundane objectives, let alone nukes.

That would absolutely happen if China invaded Taiwan and the US stood by twiddling its fingers.

Remember, Sweden and Finland were staunchly against NATO membership until Russia invaded Ukraine.

National attitudes have a remarkable ability to shift in response to neighbors getting invaded, as we learned a couple of years ago.

Japan could of course do it in secret, like others have.

In a complete disregard for the rule of law? Which other democratic countries with anti-nuclear constitution had a secret nuclear program?

Israel, though I don't think they have it in their constitution (they don't have a constitution).

Japan, among many other countries, subscribes to the idea that the milder law prevails. If an action was illegal but it was made legal after the fact, then it was legal. Similarly, an unconstitutional action can be made constitutional after the fact.

Constitutions are not supposed to be absolute constraints. They are not supposed to prevent a country from doing what is reasonable or necessary, as long as people are willing to accept that it was reasonable and necessary.

Military breaks constitution all the times, including in US. I believe most constitutions have anti torture stance, but most military have torture camp.

So that just means that if they ever make the political decision to pursue nuclear armament, they’ll call it the Japan Strategic Self-Defense Force.

As it is, Japan probably already has nukes that are all-but-assembled. Even if they don’t, they’re at most a handful of months away from taking whatever steps remain for a highly advanced industrial economy with existing nuclear infrastructure to finish building a bomb or two.

The Ukraine lesson is simple - you are not independent if you don’t have nuclear weapons. If you want to be safe you should either have nuclear weapons or be in NATO.

This is a massive fail of world’s security and it is definitely not Trump’s fault. Blame horribly incompetent policies of Merkel, Obama, and Biden who are simply afraid of putin

Hong Kong was very different than Taiwan would be. Taiwan will be a bloodbath as an armed, diehard anti-communist population fights to the death.

And if China just wants to blow it all to bits, what was the point? They want to dominate the country and its people, not own a smoldering ruin.

That notion didn't stop Russia from scorching Ukraine, can't see why it would stop China.

The issue Russia does have with Ukraine is it has to keep it's ships and planes away from Ukrainian areas or they get shot down. That'd be a problem for invading Taiwan.

There have been wargames where it has been simulated with China using its entire commercial fishing fleet as the amphibious assault force. It wouldn't be easily stoppable.

Why and how would a fishing fleet be unstoppable? Why is that better than actual landing vehicles?

It's not better. But if China is willing to take enormous losses, then they can push a lot of troops across the Taiwan Strait in requisitioned civilian boats. Essentially the maritime equivalent of a human wave assault.

I'm guessing Taiwan would only have so many anti-ship missiles so if you have more ships than that you wouldn't be able to get them all.

Russia isn’t as smart as China.

Not being connected by land, thus having to force a naval invasion, is a big deterrent.

I doubt there would be any meaningful resistance, TBH.

I could not disagree harder. I know a decent number of Taiwanese people and their hatred of communists is like my ex-Soviet friends: very very deep

Taiwan is mostly the descendants of refugees from the 1949 Communist takeover!

No, most are descended from Taiwanese who were there before the mainlanders arrived.

I know many who work in the mainland. I don't really think there is going to be a war though, maybe a super short one. It is mostly the consequences that puts CCP on check. But maybe in a few years they won't care anymore.

Unless its existence and defiance of China was a sore point. Then an uninhabited ruin might be appealing.

> North Korea will increase the range of its missiles to reliably hit the entire US.

Getting a ballistic missile to hit the continental US is the first of many problems they'll need to solve before I start losing any sleep.

They also need to be able to hit a location accurately.

And they need a hypersonic reentry vehicle capable of delivering a nuclear payload without disintegrating the bomb or prematurely burning up the explosives in it.

Those are incredibly difficult problems, and each one keeps getting worse.

North Korea has successfully tested multiple missile launches on a lofted trajectory that demonstrated an intercontinental range. I believe both the hwasong 17 and 18 are capable of hitting the continental United States. Rentry vehicles have been demonstrated multiple times. Accuracy is a bit more of a concern, but with a thermonuclear weapon missing a city by 10 miles is still more than enough to cause millions of casualties.

The DPRK is absolutely a totalitarian, backwards, hermit kingdom. But we underestimate them at our peril.

Jesus, I hadn't realized they had come so far. Apparently NK gained the ability to hit the entire continental US with Hwasong 15. The latest iterations are suspected of being designed to contain MRVs or MIRVs, which would completely overwhelm US missile defenses. It is insane that we let them go down this road.

Even they know that if one launched from their end they would all cease to exist within minutes.

This is a deterrent until Kim Jong Un loses his marbles or receives a terminal diagnosis, or until some military commander makes a serious mistake. Now multiply this same risk times fifty or sixty and you’ll see why the major project of the 20th century was limiting the number of countries with nukes.

There’s a good chance they fail since our intelligence services are essentially watching everything they do internally in real time.

And a proper failure gives an opportunity to disappear them.

DPRK does not seem too have the hydrogen bomb. Fission bombs on the kiloton range are too heavy to be mounted on ICBMs. I will not lose much sleep until there is credible information that DPRK has mastered the fusion bomb.

No, their last nuclear test was estimated at around 250 kilotons, which is indicative of a thermonuclear bomb. That was in 2017

> Those are incredibly difficult problems, and each one keeps getting worse.

Indeed, so hard that it took until 1957 for the US to master them....

Not trivialize the effort of making such rockets and reentry vehicles, but the North Koreans only have 6-10 countries to follow, at least two of which are semi-friendly to them and two more that they could crib tech from. Oh, and they have computers and it's not the 1950s anymore.

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