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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

> "The future confrontation would continue for more than a decade"?

[Edit: I should say this sentence is in the originally posted article, not the longer one from Yahoo]

Pretty sure one or both sides would launch nuclear weapons long before then, resulting in a swift (albeit very unhappy) end to the war.

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Why do you think MAD doesn’t work now?

> Why do you think MAD doesn’t work now?

I don't understand your question.

Point is that they wouldn't use nuclear because of mutually assured destruction

A decade long war between China and the US (as the article describes) would soon be a total war, which means using every weapon at your disposal.

Both sides had chemical weapons in World War II; neither side used them. Yet WWII was a total war.

That is, MAD or something MAD-like can restrain use of particular weapons, even in a total war.

Most conventional strategists believe a nuclear war wouldn't need to last a decade, as both parties would destroy themselves. Given the heavy civilian casualties and the decimation on the economies and infrastructure, the cost of a nuclear war and mutually assured destruction (MAD) outweigh the potential benefits.

The same go for modern conventional warfare.

MAD isn't a tactic. Its a result of the belief that your opponent wont do "X" because if the MAD concept.

The problem is that we're likely to get a MAD result because everyone knows of the MAD meme and thinks that their opponent is thinking.

Yes it’s just an emergent state of two or more actors doing the somewhat sensible thing (not wanting their own people to be annihilated). The question is still why this wouldn’t work, since it did work (albeit very riskily) through the entire Cold War. AFAICT no relevant variable has changed.

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