RE: Is war with China on the horizon?
November 13, 2015 at 9:13 am
(This post was last modified: November 13, 2015 at 9:25 am by Anomalocaris.)
American missiles are counterforce, meaning design to go after military targets and aimed to take out enemy's military capability and prevent enemy retaliation. Current American nuclear force in total is not sufficient to destroy 90% of China as collateral casualty. Cold War era estimates suggest a limited strike by a force equal to the total nuclear force the US deploy now would inflict only 10-20% casualties upon the Soviet Union. There is little reason to think it would do more to China. So they would inflict maybe 100-200 civilian million casualties. So it is unlikely an American first strike will permanently remove China as an opponent. Rather it would fill a wounded China with a resolve for eventual revenge.
Their heavy missiles are road mobile, and they do drive the mobile erector launcher trucks on their road system all the time, and their road system is the largest in the world. So there is almost zero possibility that any first strike can take out by sheer luck, more than a tiny portion of their road mobile missile inventory before their remaining missiles launch. The whole design of their missile force to geared towards being difficult to pin down and surviving a first strike so as to be able to exact an unacceptable price for having launched the first strike. So their missiles are countervalue, in other words targeted at soft population, industrial, economic targets. So even though Chinese nuclear forces are only 1/10 the size of American forces, they can be expected to inflict more damage than their number suggests. So they might inflict 5-10 million casualties in the United States. I don't think the United States is ready to let 5-10 million American civilians die so as to win a discretionary war with China.
Their heavy missiles are road mobile, and they do drive the mobile erector launcher trucks on their road system all the time, and their road system is the largest in the world. So there is almost zero possibility that any first strike can take out by sheer luck, more than a tiny portion of their road mobile missile inventory before their remaining missiles launch. The whole design of their missile force to geared towards being difficult to pin down and surviving a first strike so as to be able to exact an unacceptable price for having launched the first strike. So their missiles are countervalue, in other words targeted at soft population, industrial, economic targets. So even though Chinese nuclear forces are only 1/10 the size of American forces, they can be expected to inflict more damage than their number suggests. So they might inflict 5-10 million casualties in the United States. I don't think the United States is ready to let 5-10 million American civilians die so as to win a discretionary war with China.
