Hacker News Reader

Comment by buckle8017 | Hacker News Reader

> AI has a physical dependency in Taiwan that can be easily destroyed by Chinese missiles, even without an invasion

Taiwan has missiles with the range and warheads to strike the three gorges dam.

An attack by China would end very poorly for everybody. There are millions of people living in the inundation zone.

TW doesn't have any munitions that can remotely breach gravity dam like three gorges, i.e. bunker buster, which even if they did, they wouldn't have survivable platform to deliver it (strategic bombers, too heavy for TEL). US MOP tier 30000kg penetrator munitions isn't designed to crack three gorges, TW missile inventory are like 1500kg, at most they'll inflict scabbing or break exposed components like power infra, lock gates, which is not nothing, but not remotely compromise structural integrity of dam. This not to mention TW missile trajectory is geographically constrained and overflies the densest IADS environments on earth, assuming their TELs are survivable in the first place. They're much better off trying to threaten PRC coastal nuclear, but either way gets them the Gaza treatment.

A conventional missile or even missiles is not going to destroy a huge gravity dam like that. They are incredibly tough structures and missile warheads aren’t big. We’re talking concrete hundreds of feet thick.

To add some background. During WWII the allies successfully used massive specialized depth charges but those were much smaller dams. [0] During the Korean war the US struggled to merely destroy the sluice gates of a dam using aerial torpedos. [1] Eventually the Geneva Conventions were amended to forbid attacking dams if it would kill a large number of civilians (which was pretty obviously implied to begin with for what it's worth).

So unless Taiwan has a method to deliver something the size of a bunker buster to the underwater base of the upstream side of the dam I don't think it's going to happen. And if they did manage to pull it off they'd presumably be condemned as war criminals more or less universally.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwacheon_Dam

Could the chinese construct a sufficient anti-missle defence?

Obviously the actual number of missiles Taiwan has is not public, but I suspect they have enough that reliably intercepting a full barrage is not something even the us could pull off.

The general calculus is that an interceptor costs as much as the missile it intercepts, so defenses are only effective against an adversary with much less resources. Hence Israel can defend against Hamas/Hezbollah, and the US can defend against North Korea, but Israel struggles against Iran and the US doesn't even try to defend against China/Russia.

China obviously has a lot more resources than Taiwan, but then you have a concentration effect where an attacker can focus their resources on a single target, but a much more resourced defender can't necessarily afford to defend that target. We saw that play out with the UK's nuclear deterrent strategy in the cold war, where they focused on overwhelming Moscow's defenses, and were (probably) able to do it despite the USSR being so much bigger.

TW missiles can't "concentrate" because TW geography = all missile flight paths travels through boost, midcourse and terminal interceptors gauntlet along PRC easter theatre command which probably has the densest IADS in the world. PRC has like 3-4x more interceptors in eastern theater (8-12x more total) than TW has missiles. That's just land based, there's also 1000s of naval picket interceptors. Imagine if all of US patriot batteries in Florida, multiplied by 3, then asking what Cuba can do to saturate. Then add in USN DDGs and the answer is realistically nothing, because the industrial math is brutally lopsided. That's assuming TW gets to coordinate salvo their entire inventory, realistically most TELs would be glassed first, every part of TW is withing 5-7 min of PRC missiles and mlrs, less if fired from strait or loitering munitions, i.e. basically faster than abbreviated TEL setup cycle TW has for their tunnel to launch strike complex.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com