Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

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US vs China would be a war that has never been fought before. Two nuclear powers trying to kill each other.

I will also be the first time, in a direct war, that the US homeland is directly in danger. If the US invades or bombs mainland China it might be game over, the consequences could be enormous.

Like Joshua said: "The only winning move is not to play".

Since WW2 the US has been at war (oh sorry "military conflict" / "police action") nearly constantly in one form or another.

In all cases they have fought an enemy that was completely inferior.

In Afghanistan, the US used B1 bombers, Drones, Cruise missiles, attack helicopters, an F35, Warthogs and whatever else they used.

Against an enemy that primarily had AK47, some bazookas and various equipment they stole from the allies.

China is inferior to the US in a military sense, but far less so than the other countries they have fought since WW2.

China may be able to take out an aircraft carrier with supersonic missiles (maybe not), may be able to fight the F35 (less so the F22).

The other major problem for the US is that Taiwan is 200km off mainland China. China can bring nearly an unlimited supply chain going.

The US is far away and transporting equipment, soldiers, military hardware etc will be expensive, slow and prone to Chinese submarine attacks.

If China reunites Taiwan by force, it will not take long, and there is is really nothing the world can do, that is sane, except yell, scream, sanctions and so on.

Nobody wants to find out what that war would look like.

Shooting wars between nuclear powers have happened before - 1969 between China and Sov Union and in 1999 between Pakistan and India.

China/US would be the 3rd such example and would likely be similarly limited in scope.

In a China/Taiwan conflict it is likely Taiwan itself that will prevent China from taking over. Wargame scenarios tend to indicate extreme losses on China's side as their invading ships and submarines are sunk and troops on Taiwan's beaches are slaughtered while Chinese coastal cities (where most of the population, wealth and industry are) are pummeled by missiles.

Even if they "win" the outcome will look more like the Soviet invasion of Finland where a Red Army general remarked "we have won just enough land to bury our dead" than a glorious victory.

In such a situation if the US got involved at all it would likely choose to swoop in and mop up after a bruised and battered China retreats, maybe presuming that the CCP has lost moral authority and the leadership could be couped.

The fact that wargamed invasions of Taiwan are so costly for PRC is probably why they resort to saber rattling and economic pressure. It's cheaper.

Really insightful. Can you recommend any resources that discuss this?

here's a very simple piece to get started. I remember seeing much better sources but can't find any at the moment:

https://thediplomat.com/2021/05/why-a-taiwan-invasion-would-...

This seems a little far fetched. China can bring overwhelming force to bear on Taiwan. Without the US being involved, it would only be a matter of time before the PRC had near total air superiority. And they also have medium range missiles.

Taiwan is serious about military defense and they are well prepared. They have been for a long time. But China simply has far greater numbers and they are very highly motivated.

Taiwan is a pain in the arse to invade. Its an island surrounded by deep water.

This means that you need complete air and sea control before invasion. Thats costly and difficult, if you want the island to be intact afterwards.

It's not that hard when the island is 200km away and you have 10 000 precision missiles and ten time as many fighters. Total air and navam superiority is something the Chinese are projected to gain in a day or so.

> Thats costly and difficult, if you want the island to be intact afterwards.

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would almost certainly entail a prior reconciliation with extreme, prolonged economic disruption from severe global backlash. China desires to control Taiwan as a matter of territorial integrity (from its perspective), diminishment of U.S. strategic influence, and in general national pride. I wouldn't be surprised if the first inbound missiles targeted TSMC and other important industrial assets--less incentive for the U.S. to come to Taiwan's defense. (Not that I think the U.S's decision to intervene would be predicated on mere industrial ties.)

I doubt overwhelming air superiority would be possible, certainly with conventional aircraft. Taiwan has really good anti aircraft systems. Perhaps if China is in posession of some sort of drone tech as yet unheard of. Even then air superiority only gets them so far.

PRC is obviously massively more powerful but Taiwan can still exact a toll way WAY higher than they'd be prepared to tolerate.

Taiwan's indigenous anti air system has never been tested. The Patriot systems that the US provided are really bad, in Israel they routinely fail to intercept drones, and in Saudi Arabia they failed to intercept low quality cruise missiles. Those are basic targets with no jamming and no anti-radiation threat. In a real war with China it would get absolutely destroyed. What we do know about indigenous Taiwanese systems is that plenty of buyers were sought but none preferred it to the alternatives.

They will not make it more than two days against the Chinese. Taiwanese has pretty bad air defence systems. There's a reason Turkey wanted to buy S-400 and that's because American air defences suck badly.

>The fact that wargamed invasions of Taiwan are so costly for PRC

I don't know what wargames you've been reading but recent western ones finally comport with analysis out of PRC from last few years that a PRC-TW confrontation would be relatively expedient and low cost for PRC, militarily. Current assumption is PRC will secure air dominance within days and enable a lot of relatively uncontested actions in absence of US intervention.

TW barely has enough ordinants to arm their prestige military aquisitions. They certainly don't have enough missiles to damage PRC coastal cities without venturing into warcrime scenarios. It's why currently US is desperately trying to pressure the island into adopting porcupine strategies to bleed PRC in case of invasion. But island isn't biting, the establishment is actively stalling reforms because reinstating civil service and telling population their only hope is to fight like insurgents is politically unworkable.

>invasions of Taiwan are so costly for PRC

The invasion itself isn't and hasn't been for a while. The concern has been dealing with US intervention, i.e. SLOC blockades and potential trade sanctions. Taking TW with relatively little cost is almost forgone at this point. Not to mention PRC has host of other strategies without formal invasion like blockade/quarantine they can do right now without single boot on the ground. There is almost no one except the most deluded actual shills that gets paid by TW (i.e. Ian Easton) who thinks TW can put up much of a fight against PRC anymore.

I read a few that indicated that the US wouldnt do really badly in an "all out" scenario. The US is geared towards fighting colonial wars rather than facing off against equiv-tech adversaries.

They can help a lot (and with relative safety) by firing MCBMs from far away, downing Chinese satellites, supplying arms and materiel beforehand and sending subs to sink chinese invading ships but aircraft carriers, fighter jets and long range bombers would all be useless.

Most wargame scenarios indicate a heavy loss of life on all sides (partly coz the US does insist on using easily sinkable aircraft carriers). China might be able to win if it threw everything it had at the invasion but realistically the government would topple if it deliberately tolerated extreme loss of life (60%+ attrition rate for invading soldiers, perhaps?) - especially if it was doing it invading their Chinese "brothers".

If it were as easy as you said it would already have happened.

If the US is involved that is something else. The issue is that Taiwan might already fall before the US gets seriously in there.

Submarines are complicated. The Taiwan strait is not very deep and any US subs would have to deal with UUVs in large numbers and sonarphones. It would be a difficult target.

Shooting down satellites is a very risky proposition. If the US attempts that, the Chinese will retaliate. The US has a lot more to gain from satellites than the Chinese do.

Once those satellites are shot down though the US has no accurate ballistic missiles. The ATACMS relies on GPS for good accuracy. There is no GPS-independent seeker for ballistic missiles in US service. It's also a slow and easy to intercept missile.

It's not happening because, as a Chinese General put it, why today and not tomorrow? The more time goes on the cheaper and easier and quicker it will be, so there is no reason to rush it.

The other thing is that China is unlike any other peer oponent the US has geared up to fight. They aren't only high-tech, they are also assymetrical. If the US builds another massive carrier strike group, the Chinese will build two hundred antiship hypersonic missiles (whether ballistic or otherwise). If the US builds 100 bombers to deliver a thousand stealthy cruise missiles, the Chinese will use their satellites to detect them taking off and retreat their ships to within range of mainland air defences and integrate the ships air defences to form an air defence system far surpassing anything else outside of Russian (the Chinese use basically the same air defence systems on their ships and on land). Good luck overwhelming the equivalent of 50 air defences brigades all working together. The US spends a hundred billion dollars on super stealthy submarines? No problem, build ten times as many small drone submarines and put high powered sonars at the bottom of the sea beyond the reach of any torpedoes and use active sonar as much as you want without risking any sailor or high value equipment, then keep your ships behind this perimeter. If the US is going to fly advanced stealth fighters, you don't meet them with your own plane for plane, you build super long range missiles and high altitude stealth interceptors to lob them at support aircraft before they can be detected, then bomb the shit out of wherever they took off from before they can re-arm, while blunting the first strike with an air defence system they'll take days to disable.

Because China is only going to fight in its backyard it doesn't have to fight ship for ship and plane for plane like the Soviets or the Germans. It wants to bring the US to fight it in the worst possible place and then beat it assymetrically using every conceivable advantage.

There were no wars like WW1 or WW2 fought before them. It's a horrifying thought but not an implausible one on a long timescale. Eventually a society goes batshit (Nazis, Trumpers, etc) and goes all in on the idea.

There will probably be a thermonuclear war in our future timeline, but is it worth, for us the people, to think or prepare for it? When or if it happens, there'll be nothing left.

We can just assume it'll never happen and fight any war outside the physical battlefield (with economical or cyber wars), while trying to spread to other planets.

Preparing for thermonuclear war equates to preventing it from ever happening.

The aftermath is like 536 ("the worst year in human history"), but orders of magnitude worse. Radiactive ash covers the sky. The Sun don't shine for years, possibly decades. Temperatures drop to permanent winter, everthing freezes. Food doesn't grow. Animals die. Civilization collapses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536

Only geothermally powered, self-sufficient survival bunkers can support a handful of people, and it's a fight against time. The genetic pool is decimated and our biological evolution is basically halted. Hope you printed out the whole of Wikipedia, and can find the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the arctic somehow.

Thermonuclear war would certainly kill life in a lot of places and render large areas inhospitable, but I’m not convinced Nuclear Winter wasn’t exaggerated propaganda. Remember the USA/Soviet Union exploded hundreds of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere between the 1940s and 1960s, including some terrifyingly large hydrogen bombs that were much more powerful than what we deliver on ICBMs. Chances are most of the northern hemisphere would have a bad time with fallout for a year or two but large parts of the Southern Hemisphere would continue on as if nothing happened.

These tests were all tweaked for low fallout though, with artificially reduced yields.

And many were air bursts that are less bad because they don't throw a whole lot of soil into the air. A lot of the multi megatonne ones in particular. They weren't simulating actual attack scenarios with those as they were so overpowered there'd be no point. It was just a big dick measuring contest at that point. I think the Soviets won with their Tsar Bomba and I guess the US wasn't willing to escalate it further.

But yeah I think most of the nuclear winter scenarios were based on massive conflict with those multi megatonne bombs which are no longer in use.

The meteor that nearly killed the dinosaurs is estimated to have contained 420 zettajoules of energy in its impact, and to have killed to extinction 75% of all plant and animal species on Earth. There are some 13_000 nuclear weapons currently in the world. If we assume they are all equivalent to the largest one ever tested (210 petajoules), they would in aggregate contain 2.73 zettajoules of energy, or 0.65% of the meteor.

Maybe you're right, we don't have the capacity to blow up the Earth quite yet.

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