181–190 of 321 posts
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> only "independent" because we got involved The people of Taiwan do not want to be invaded by China. So, given that this is their wish, and Taiwan wants to be able to defend itself, it is OK to support their wishes and give them the means to defend themselves. > The decision was already made. Well, they are right now deciding that they want to be able to defend themselves. So I respect that decision, which is that t…
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All they need to do is look at what happened in Hong Kong. If China did not do what they did in Hong Kong, Taiwan may be headed to some kind on unification. Now, they would be crazy to even entertain that thought. This issue lies directly on China and no one else. If I had a say in Taiwan, I would announce it is now a independent Country.
All they need to do is look at what happened in Hong Kong. If China did not do what they did in Hong Kong, Taiwan may be headed to some kind on unification. Now, they would be crazy to even entertain that thought. This issue lies directly on China and no one else. If I had a say in Taiwan, I would announce it is now a independent Country.
The Taiwanese concept of "unification" is not what you're thinking of. The Taiwanese faction supporting unification (usually the KMT) does not envision a world where Taiwan is/becomes a province of the PRC, they envision a world where the ROC governs all current PRC provinces, that is where they are in the seat of power in Beijing. I.e. this is something going in the opposite direction. The opposing faction rejects t…
All they need to do is look at what happened in Hong Kong. If China did not do what they did in Hong Kong, Taiwan may be headed to some kind on unification. Now, they would be crazy to even entertain that thought. This issue lies directly on China and no one else. If I had a say in Taiwan, I would announce it is now a independent Country.
Hong Kong was leased to Britain till 1997. Very different case. As for Taiwan, if they declared independence it will be an act of war. Don't forget that US protects Taiwan on the basis it does not declare itself a sovereign country. Also, don't forget this is the official map of the Republic of China (Taiwan): https://i.redd.it/jbyegko5mkc21.jpg
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You detonate one over open waters and tell China to back down. If they do, problem solved. If they don't, at that stage it probably didn't hurt.
> You detonate one over open waters and tell China to back down. Then China detonates ten over open waters, and tells "you" to back down and not go there. The magic deterrent value of nukes (mutually assured destruction) doesn't work if one side can't assure destruction of the other. Even if Taiwan can manage such a show of nuclear force, China can (credibly) threaten to annihilate it if it attacks, but the reverse i…
Exactly!
China has ~350 warheads, and they play a shell game where they have more silos than ICBMs and they are swapping the ICBMs around the empty silos and nobody knows which one is full and which one is empty. Which means if you are targeting their nuclear forces you need to spend much more warheads to knock out all of theirs. That is a lot of warheads (and delivery mechanism) to “secretly smuggle in”. And even after you somehow knock out all their nukes China has their conventional forces, they are angry and fair to say justified in tearing Taiwan apart.
If Taiwan decides to target chinese cities. Do you think China will say “whoohooo, you won”? They will be very angry, the Chinese people will demand the attacker’s head, on top of Tawain just lost significant international support for basically killing civilians by the millions.
Of course they can also aim at invading conventional forces, but if China is just a little bit competent they won’t bunch up enough of their troops to make a nuke justified. Meaning that Taiwan would waste a whole warhead and delivery mechanism to sink a single ship, or knock out an enemy harbour. They can do it, but they can also probably do it conventionaly.
I don’t think brandishing nukes is going to help the Taiwanese government here.
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No, we can assume that because of long and well documented history of US interfering in Taiwan and pouring billions of dollars into creating a secessionist movement there.
No, we can assume that Taiwan is an independant sovereign country in its own right according to the will of its people. The one pouring billions into creating a secessionist movement there is China.
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> Taiwan will reveal them at the very last moment when war is imminent. Ok, they reveal them. What is next? Nukes are not magic. They are just weapons. What do you think would happen once they are “revealed”? What delivery mechanism are you proposing? Should they be aimed counter-force or counter-value? (Meaning are they trying to shoot the chinese nuclear launchers or are they lobbing them into chinese cities?) How…
> Ok, they reveal them. What is next? Nukes are not magic. I'd wager that if you're amassing forces to conduct an invasion and midway through you discovered your target has nukes pointed at you, the very least you'd do is rethink your strategy and put a pause on operations.
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The only reason PRC would invade Taiwan is if Washington started installing ICBM silos there. In which case they would just knock out that infrastructure with long-range strikes.
Taiwan is only 200km away from mainland china. You don't need ICBM.
What I don't get is that to invade Taiwan, China needs a large amount of ships and cargo planes, both of which seem very vulnerable to modern missiles (as the Russian army found out in Ukraine). Do the chinese have a solution for that?
> China needs a large amount of ships and cargo planes We're watching warfare change right now. There are many paths to success for China, given enough attention and focus. Just one: 100 million drones to deal with all the fixed defences, and then you arrive to negotiate once you've repeatedly overwhelmed the enemy for 6 months. We've spent the last few decades helping China build the biggest manufacturing engine in…
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> Ok, they reveal them. What is next? Nukes are not magic. I'd wager that if you're amassing forces to conduct an invasion and midway through you discovered your target has nukes pointed at you, the very least you'd do is rethink your strategy and put a pause on operations.
From here on I will call this tactic “stopping a charging rhino with a bubble blower”. It does not have a credible chance of hurting the rhino. It won’t stop the rhino directly, but maybe it confuses the rhino? And maybe the confused rhino stops, instead of stomping on the cause of confusion?
I don't follow. What exactly leads you to believe that lobbing nukes at an invasion force's staging area and/or neighboring military bases "does not have a credible chance of hurting" the invader?