Taiwan might have an equal deterrent to nukes, and the mainstream hasn't discussed it at all. We learned last month some details of Taiwan's secret supersonic cruise missile they've been developing since 2019. What got my antennae up though, was hearing it had a range around 1500 km or better. Taiwan doesn't need to hit anything that far out defensively. So if you draw a circle 1500 km out from the center of Taiwan on a map, you'll find the target pretty quickly, 1250 km away, visible from space, right in the missile's striking distance: The Great Wall of China.
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Psyche. Gotcha. It's actually the Three Gorges Dam. Most know it as the world's largest hydroelectric dam, but are unaware of how important it is. I wasn't, and the more I read the more horrified I became. Some highlights:
- It delivers more power than 20 nuclear reactors
- Water rises up to 175-meters above the downstream area
- Its crest width is 7545-ft (1.5 miles). The crest width of Hoover Dam by example is 45-ft...
- It's so big, that according to NASA, the shift of water masses stored slow Earth's rotation 0.06 microseconds and makes the planet slightly more round in the middle and flat on the poles.
- It took 17-years to build
It's ostensibly designed to withstand a magnitude-10 earthquake, a claim some engineers doubt. If it was damaged, it would flood and impact 75% of China's rice production which feed the majority of the population, flood their most important manufacturing corridor, flood Shanghai, Changsha, and Wuhan permanently, knock out military installations, deprecate a large percentage of the country's electrical generation, and kill over 100M people while displacing hundreds of millions more. A single piece of infrastructure. A single point of failure. Apocalyptic. It would dramatically effect everyone in the world, including you and I. It would be safer if a Czar hydrogen bomb was dropped on Shanghai.
The Manhattan Project is pretty fresh in our minds, thanks to the Oppenheimer film, but did you know napalm was developed at the same time in a secret collaboration between Harvard and the US Government? The US Air Force firebombed 64 Japanese cities to ash including Tokyo using napalm before the nukes dropped, killing many orders of magnitude more people, and causing significantly more damage than the nukes did. The President dropped the nukes because he got to be the first President and person to use them. It's the same reason Trump wanted a contiguous southern border built so badly, or why Obama wanted healthcare, or why you see swing Justices voting in strange ways — because their name gets to go on it.
Nobody knows the missile's payloads, or China's A2D2 capabilities, I'm just suggesting it could meet Taiwan's deterrence objectives without the use of nuclear weapons. Conventional mutual assured destruction.