China Ballistic Missiles and Nuclear Arms Thread

[Richard Santos]

I don't think China needs an automatic system. With the advancements in early warning satellites/OTH radars, China can detect an incoming first strike and order a launch before it lands.

If china acquired the second strike capability that has high probability of inflicting unacceptable damage on attackers, as the USSR most assuredly had in the 1970s and 1980s, then the most likely threat will not begin with an easily detected mass launch of SLBM and ICBMs.

The most likely threat will come from out of the box threats such as stealth bomber delivering penetrating decapitating strikes on national leadership and senior operational command structure. The resulting confusion over what happened, who is in charge, and what is going on would open a window for an unanswered mass strike. The B2 stealth bomber was designed with delivering such a decapitating strike in mind, abd The soviet perimeter system is designed to defeat such a threat at a fundamental level by ensuring any such strike will trigger a nuclear counterattack even if the strike is successful.

Keep in mind there are many ways a national command structure can fail. A bilateral nuclear exchange on thousands of warheads on each side is going to be a civilization ending event. There is probably a large overlap between organization character abd behavior that would prevent such a thing from occurring out of haste or recklessness, and organizational behavior that would be indecisive at the moment of crisis and thus be wiped out before ordering a retaliation.

So there is much to be said for mechanistic system that ensures the decision to launch second strike is made in a way predicatable to not only oneself, but the enemy as well.

All of the nuclear launch protocols developed by the US and USSR were geared to exactly one thing, making second strike as inevitable as accidental launch is improbable.

it is not hard to make second strike inevitable. making each missile independent and automatically launch upon detection of nuclear explosions in key areas of the country will do it. they trick is to make such a system totally safe with no possibility of accidents.

 

[escobar]

View attachment 74223
NO WORDS......

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1412824844178137092

 

[Godzilla]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1412824844178137092

I did some more digging and I believe they are much more likely to be wind farm bases. I think its actually 2 separate wind farms being constructed at the same time. The northern cluster of 50 should be a 200MW wind farm, while the southern cluster of 69/70 is another 200MW wind farm. From the project listings, it looks like part of the phase 2 of the Jiuquan 10GW wind farm base. The developers are likely to be Datang group （大唐） and CGNPC（中广核, so its kinda nuclear haha). The spacing itself makes sense for the current 2/3/4MW sized wind turbines that is being erected in the area. These have blade diameters of around 165m. If you use the rule of thumb calculation of 15x blade diameter for the minimum optimal spacing, you get around 2500m distance between the basis. The wind farm currently marked on their map is the CGNPC's 50MW Yumen Heiyazhi wind farm put into operation in 2019/2020. That baby did 3800 full load hour last year so the area is definitely a gold mine for wind! To the south is the Datang Changma wind farm, another 50MW plant from a decade back.
Jiuquan wind farm base just hit 10GW installed capacity last month, and is part of the 14-5 plan for renewable energy. The HVDC feed line going to Hunan and another going to Shandong basically restarted the wind farm boom in the area again.

 

[Godzilla]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1412824844178137092

Also, this kind of shows how out of touch this guy is in terms of things outside of his field, and firing from the hip. yes indeed those wind turbines are only around 500m apart. But those are 1.5MW/ 0.75MW turbines from over a decade or 2 ago. These have blade diameter of between 70-80m. Using the rule of thumb from a decade ago, the minimum distance between turbines is 7x70 or 7x80 = 490 to 560m. Today's wind turbines are double their size in terms of turbine blade diameter, and a factor of 15 is increasing being used. (Check the goldwind's new turbines out)

 

[AssassinsMace]

What happened to those US spy satellites that can read a license plate on a car? That was two decades ago. I imagine civilian satellites are just as good by now.

 

[Richard Santos]

What happened to those US spy satellites that can read a license plate on a car? That was two decades ago. I imagine civilian satellites are just as good by now.

This is called gray propaganda. You create a lot of shit that is attributed to various supposedly independent third parties. You then throw them all at your opponent, and some of it will stick.

 

[AndrewS]

conversely, the fireball and material thrown up by a nuclear ground blast provide a shield effect against any warhead coming in after the first one. So if silos are packed very close together, the first hit might take out several, but no further hit can be expected on the surviving silos within a izeable area around the first hit for a significant period of time afterwards, providing a window for those missiles to be launched in a second strike.

Having MX missiles based in this way, where 100 missile silos are clustered closely together so ground blast of hit on one of them will protect the rest long enough for them to be launched, was seriously considered by the US in the 1970s.

Look up “Dense Pack”.

however, the dense pack arrangement for MX envision the silos spaces several hundred feet apart, not several miles apart.

But remember Dense Pack was only proposed because a pre-emptive nuclear airburst defence above the silos was deemed unacceptable.

Suppose the Chinese actually plan on this?

 

[Richard Santos]

But remember Dense Pack was only proposed because a pre-emptive nuclear airburst defence above the silos was deemed unacceptable.

Suppose the Chinese actually plan on this?

the original idea was not preemptive nuclear air burst, but preemptive nuclear ground burst. The debris cloud thrown up by the ground burst was an integral part of the concept.

The idea was politically unacceptable because it would in effect be deliberately creating large amount of highly radioactive fallout that would primarily land on the country the effort was supposedly protecting.

Enemy warheads creating the fallout was inevitable and was therefore acceptable as a consequence of dense pack.

 

[AssassinsMace]

This is called gray propaganda. You create a lot of shit that is attributed to various supposedly independent third parties. You then throw them all at your opponent, and some of it will stick.

Good luck finding finding China's ASBMs then...

 

[Richard Santos]

Good luck finding finding China's ASBMs then...

I meant the story about these photos purported to show Chinese missile silos is probably gray propaganda. I didn’t believe these were real missile silos for reasons I outline further back In the thread.

Also, I bet the commercial satellite images purported to show the Chinese missiles didn’t come from an American vendor.

1. It is America that is mainly driving the hype about the China threat and the story will be more credible if the source of purported evidence didn’t come from an American entity, even if private.

2. American entities actually don’t own large segment of the commercial satellite image market despite the fact that America probably does command a technical lead in this field both in military and commercial sectors. The reason is America has been so jealous of its satellite imagining capability it places too much restrictions on them for entities trying to make a living selling them commercially to be successful.