taiwan missile defense and mainland missile

I've said it on other threads and I'll say it again: the best military option Beijing has to defeat Taipei is use nuclear weapons from Day 1 of the conflict. Don't even mess around with the extreme complexities of an air war and amphibious assault, just use nuclear weapons and end the war quick. Specially, detonate a nuclear a weapon off the Taiwan coast as a demonstration weapon, then give Taipei 48 hours to surrender, or other cities will get hit. Taiwan does not have the means to retaliate and is not under any nation's nuclear umbrella.

The exact same rationale for the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Japan apply to Taiwan: the desire to quickly end the war and save lives. I agree with Jeff Head and Rolling Wave that while China could probably win the air power in a couple weeks, an amphibious invasion would be ugly and risky, with a potentially devastating defeat for mainland. A victory in less than a week with almost no PLA casualties is Beijing dream scenario.

Demonstrating a nuclear weapon first to show Beijing's resolve could potentially end the war with no casualties on either side. Only if Taiwan tries to pull an Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany and hold out to the bitter would there many casualties. But then again, there would be a hell of a lot of casualties during an invasion, too. And if Taiwan is really that diehard, it doesn't matter whether China uses nuclear weapons or not, either way it'll be total war and a knock-down, drag-out fight in which hundreds of thousands die. But if Taiwan is reasonable, they will surrender after the demonstration weapon and end the war before it begins, saving lives on both sides.

Geographer said:

I've said it on other threads and I'll say it again: the best military option Beijing has to defeat Taipei is use nuclear weapons from Day 1 of the conflict. Don't even mess around with the extreme complexities of an air war and amphibious assault, just use nuclear weapons and end the war quick. Specially, detonate a nuclear a weapon off the Taiwan coast as a demonstration weapon, then give Taipei 48 hours to surrender, or other cities will get hit. Taiwan does not have the means to retaliate and is not under any nation's nuclear umbrella.

The exact same rationale for the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Japan apply to Taiwan: the desire to quickly end the war and save lives. I agree with Jeff Head and Rolling Wave that while China could probably win the air power in a couple weeks, an amphibious invasion would be ugly and risky, with a potentially devastating defeat for mainland. A victory in less than a week with almost no PLA casualties is Beijing dream scenario.

Demonstrating a nuclear weapon first to show Beijing's resolve could potentially end the war with no casualties on either side. Only if Taiwan tries to pull an Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany and hold out to the bitter would there many casualties. But then again, there would be a hell of a lot of casualties during an invasion, too. And if Taiwan is really that diehard, it doesn't matter whether China uses nuclear weapons or not, either way it'll be total war and a knock-down, drag-out fight in which hundreds of thousands die. But if Taiwan is reasonable, they will surrender after the demonstration weapon and end the war before it begins, saving lives on both sides.

Click to expand...

well i guess china non-first use policy is out of the window.

Policy is a policy, it can be changed any time

»Ø¸´: taiwan missile defense and mainland missile

PRc doesn't need nukes to crush taiwan. It just needs to do it quickly, and then Us has no opportunity to intervene without instigating a world war.

Geographer said:

I've said it on other threads and I'll say it again: the best military option Beijing has to defeat Taipei is use nuclear weapons from Day 1 of the conflict. Don't even mess around with the extreme complexities of an air war and amphibious assault, just use nuclear weapons and end the war quick. Specially, detonate a nuclear a weapon off the Taiwan coast as a demonstration weapon, then give Taipei 48 hours to surrender, or other cities will get hit. Taiwan does not have the means to retaliate and is not under any nation's nuclear umbrella.

The exact same rationale for the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Japan apply to Taiwan: the desire to quickly end the war and save lives. I agree with Jeff Head and Rolling Wave that while China could probably win the air power in a couple weeks, an amphibious invasion would be ugly and risky, with a potentially devastating defeat for mainland. A victory in less than a week with almost no PLA casualties is Beijing dream scenario.

Demonstrating a nuclear weapon first to show Beijing's resolve could potentially end the war with no casualties on either side. Only if Taiwan tries to pull an Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany and hold out to the bitter would there many casualties. But then again, there would be a hell of a lot of casualties during an invasion, too. And if Taiwan is really that diehard, it doesn't matter whether China uses nuclear weapons or not, either way it'll be total war and a knock-down, drag-out fight in which hundreds of thousands die. But if Taiwan is reasonable, they will surrender after the demonstration weapon and end the war before it begins, saving lives on both sides.

Click to expand...

There's one fault in that logic. Taiwan will sure surrender if threatened with nukes. That's not the end of resistance. And because of the nuclear weapon threat this resistance will feel entitled to strike back with similar weapons, following international law entitlement for this act in a way.

How do you feel about chemical and especially biological terrorism in all major cities on the PRC mainland utilizing breed multi-resistant deadly bacteria (obtainable in the surgery of many hospitals)? Perhaps transfer their plasmids to something deadlier and here you go. Would you be even able to track such an attack?

In the aftermath of the Holocaust there was a revenge plan to poison the few German wells for drinking water in major cities, well, the Israeli agent was a good human and decided against it. Otherwise he could have killed at least one German for every Jew who died in the Holocaust.

I also repeat myself, if you win too fast you make the after-fight the more bloody (call it Taleban-effect).

You create a resistance and for financial reasons combined into a criminal underground with the military know-how and secret service knowledge of the ROC that is at liberty to roam in the PRC China and feels morally entitled to harm the PRC to the degree of destroying it. The triads will be most enlighted to have this capable support that helps them to retake their former positions of power in the mainland. This moral entitlement feeling because of the enormous PRC crime will ease recruiting a lot and decrease any likelyhood of sympathy for the PRC as well as any restraint in violence utilization.

Sorry, but nuking Taiwan is the most brilliant plan to destroy the whole PRC. Military actions do have political consequences and every side, no matter how brutally subjugated, is at liberty to keep fighting with all means available as long as they wish. Such fighting doesn't need to obey any laws of war, know any civilians or innocent children, can utilize the outmost psychological terror and doesn't care about any instruments of surrender.

Simple question: if someone takes over your hometown like this, what would you do?

»Ø¸´: Re: taiwan missile defense and mainland missile

Sorry, but nuking Taiwan is the most brilliant plan to destroy the whole PRC.

Click to expand...

This makes no practical sense. PRC doens't need to nuke taiwan to win decisively, but even if it did only those on the island would die.

PRc doesn't need nukes to crush taiwan. It just needs to do it quickly, and then Us has no opportunity to intervene without instigating a world war.

Click to expand...

I absolutely agree that Beijing needs Taipei's surrender to come quickly, two months at the most, ideally in a week. Those time frames are nearly impossible to achieve conventionally.

Formal, political surrender is so valuable to the PRC because it immediately ends large scale military operations by ROC forces. Moreover, it is highly unlikely the United Sates or Japan would come to Taiwan's aid after surrender. If the military stages a coup d'tat to prevent surrender, like almost happened in Japan 1945, then other countries will be loath to come in on the side of a military junta. No doubt some Taiwanese diehards would keep fighting, but the PLA can easily handle those. The PRC has proven itself very skilled at internal security and counter-terrorism. Formal political surrender would provide closure to the Chinese civil war.

An unconditional surrender would provide the best legal basis for the post-war reconstruction of China's reputation. China's reputation internationally would take a hit, but if they won quick and convincingly, China is too big and powerful to hold a grudge against. Look at the all the countries who strongly opposed the United States' 2003 invasion of Iraq. Their government and populations were strongly opposed it, and very vocal about it, but they did absolutely nothing except protest! Big, strong countries can do things the rest of the world hates and get away with it, as long as it doesn't drag on.

There's one fault in that logic. Taiwan will sure surrender if threatened with nukes. That's not the end of resistance. And because of the nuclear weapon threat this resistance will feel entitled to strike back with similar weapons, following international law entitlement for this act in a way.

How do you feel about chemical and especially biological terrorism in all major cities on the PRC mainland utilizing breed multi-resistant deadly bacteria (obtainable in the surgery of many hospitals)? Perhaps transfer their plasmids to something deadlier and here you go. Would you be even able to track such an attack?

Click to expand...

Taiwan doesn't have nuclear weapons and probably does not have biological or chemical weapons. If they do, it is not on the level of the doomsday you describe. Nor do they have the means to put them in "all the major cities on the PRC mainland." Give me a break. Even if they did, I would bet that the casualties from such an attack would be far less than what China would suffer in a conventional invasion.

Simple question: if someone takes over your hometown like this, what would you do?

Click to expand...

Most people would probably get on with their lives. How did Japanese feel to have Americans occupying their cities after losing two cities to nuclear weapons, not to mention hundreds of thousands of other civilians to American fire-bombing. The Japanese felt defeated and were scared of the Americans. They prostituted themselves in unprecedented numbers in order to survive and win pity from the Americans. I'm not saying that would happen with Taiwan, but it shows a historical precedent in an Asian country.

I don't see a Taiwanese insurgency likely or a deal-breaker for an attack. Once the PLA have sufficient soldiers on the ground, PRC intelligence agents and the MSS will go to town and be rounding up weapons and sympathizers. China has proven itself very good at suppressing rebellions in Tibet and Xinjiang. If you look at places where insurgencies succeeded in the last 30 years (Afghanistan, Iraq to some respect, Lebanon, Libya), they all involved the deterioration and collapse of the government doing the occupying. China is the exact opposite of that.

The PRC has a staunchly nationalist population of 1.3 billion who strongly oppose Taiwanese independence. They have a very strong government and bureaucracy. They have a very strong military and intelligence apparatus. The first generation of Chinese in Taiwanese to live under PRC rule might start something, but the next generation raised in a PRC education system and culture will reject the independence desires of their parents and see Taiwan as an integral part of China.

What would be the objectives of a Taiwan insurgency? Independence? No way that will ever garner sympathy on the mainland or even among their former allies. Federalism ala Hong Kong? Maybe, but Beijing has been holding out the carrot informally for a decade and Taiwan hasn't bitten. The mainland and most Asian countries would have no sympathy for a province that spurned an offer of peaceful resolution before the war, then after defeat wants to go back to the negotiating table. That's not how conflict diplomacy works: to the victor go the spoils; all the more reason to find a peaceful resolution to the issue of Taiwan's sovereignty before a war starts. To be fair, imagine the PRC losing a war with Taiwan and then insisting that Taiwan immediately surrender to Beijing. Taipei would never stop laughing.

Subduing Taiwan might take a generation as more mainlanders migrate to Taiwan and the education and media instill a pro-Beijing culture among the youth. There is no reason Taiwan's residents will not be as nationalistic as Guangdong residents twenty years after the war.

Besides, an insurgency in Taiwan is just as likely to occur through conventional invasion as through rapid surrender from nuclear attack. Maybe the only difference is that most of the ROC military would be destroyed in a conventional invasion whereas it is left intact by rapid surrender.

Two months is a reasonable timeframe for subduing Taiwan. I consider it will still play out first in a SLoC battle that will decide on whether Taiwanese hopes are crushed. The actual invasion would if it appears rather mopping up a population and military that knows it can't win. So I consider it paramount to isolate Taiwan from all hopes of support first if you want to subdue the island without prolonged resistance.

Considering the USA and Japan, that doesn't compare. The Japanese had most obviously lost the conventional naval war. The question was whether they would attack machine guns with spears or not and quite some Japanese were opposed to that while a military with an inflated ego had still problems of acknowledging defeat. Of course, the attack of two weapons with unprecendented destructive power was a very brutal act. But could massed conventional bombing capability achieve similar results?

Two months is a reasonable timeframe for subduing Taiwan. I consider it will still play out first in a SLoC battle that will decide on whether Taiwanese hopes are crushed. The actual invasion would if it appears rather mopping up a population and military that knows it can't win. So I consider it paramount to isolate Taiwan from all hopes of support first if you want to subdue the island without prolonged resistance.

Click to expand...

I agree. The PLAN and PLAAF are at an suitably advanced level where they can comfortably establish dominance over the air and seas with its existing forces, assuming no foreign help. But it would still take a few weeks. They could try to starve the island out, as 23 million people need a lot of food and fuel imports. It would be effective in inducing some kind of negotiated surrender, but would take many months. The longer the conflict drags on, the more likely foreign interference will be, if not militarily then economically in terms of sanctions and so on. The ensuing famine will be well covered by international media. Every night the world will see pictures of a skinny family eating rats to survive, blaming the Communists for their plight. It would look very bad. Eventually China will want to end the war and have to stage an invasion. I don't think a naval blockade would affect the ROC's combat power very much, but rather hit the whole island and put tremendous pressure on their leaders to end the stand-off.

Of course, the attack of two weapons with unprecendented destructive power was a very brutal act. But could massed conventional bombing capability achieve similar results?

Click to expand...

In military terms, a nuclear weapon is no more powerful than the combined bomb loads of hundreds of aircraft, plus the leftover radiation that makes the site uninhabitable for a few years. The firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 killed more people than the atomic bombs, over 125,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians. (Why those firebombings aren't considered a war crime is beyond me.) The U.S. dropped more ordinance on Vietnam than it dropped in World War II. In psychological terms, nuclear weapons are beyond the pale, and especially frightening in 1945 when they were new to the world. Five decades of nuclear arms buildup between the U.S. and USSR led to apocalyptic visions if they were ever used. Yet, look at how Nagasaki and Hiroshima have come back, or how Tokyo came back from being 50% incinerated. The bombs used there were small compared to most warheads to day, 20-40 kilotons vs. the several hundred kiloton warheads in most ICBMs, but modern warheads don't have to be that big.

My argument about the political and military advantages to Beijing using nuclear weapons against Taiwan from the get-go is this:

1) It would end the war very quickly, which is hugely advantageous to Beijing.
2) It guarantees victory for Beijing while the quick surrender makes foreign intervention unlikely.
3) It has the potential for inducing quick surrender with almost no loss of life in a nuclear weapon is demonstrated off the coast first.
4) The huge casualties that would arise from using nuclear weapon against a real target would occur in a conventional war as well, when considering a naval blockade, bombing campaign, and invasion. It is estimated that between 100,000 and a million Iraqis have died as a result of the 2003 invasion, when considering not only violent deaths but excess deaths due to destroyed infrastructure. All of Taiwan might be wrecked in a long, drawn-out invasion, where as one medium sized city could be destroyed with a nuclear weapon to induce surrender.
5) Taiwan has no nuclear weapons and very few offensive capabilities, nor is under any nuclear umbrella, so Beijing need not fear in-kind retaliation.
6) A conventional invasion could very well fail, even without foreign intervention. Amphibious assaults are hard to coordinate and succeed, and repelling one has been the prime mission of the ROC army for seventy years. When it comes to amphibious assaults, geography and history strongly favor the defender.

Theoretically, Taiwan can strike back with dirty bombs that can cause as much longterm damage and suffering as nuclear attacks, but lack the energy burst. (the island has nuclear fuel). I consider nuclear weapons as overrated because much of their energy is wasted despite impressive numbers and their actual impact is rather in the long contamination.
I admit, that a nuclear attack would be a signal few would try to oppose. It would be a rational choice if China considers all issues settled with the annexiation of Taiwan and doesn't count on a future large scale war with a nuclear armed power. Breaking the second strike doctrine on China's side could give the second nuclear age the very devastating spin of actual nuclear combat because number of players increased. So far the second strike doctrine was considered China's shield for engaging in all kinds of conflicts without MAD risks. For whatever reason, the Chinese navy seems to currently consider nuclear strikes against carriers, maybe a hot air attack, maybe a real change of mind that could mean that first strike gets part of their arsenal. So while your chain of events seems logical, I'm not sure this will be the only consideration, although it likely can be one in the evolving thoughts of PLAN.