problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
But throughout history, the Chinese were generally more pragmatic about it than other historical actors.
Yeah, I don't agree with the idea that the Chinese tributary system was quite so static and Sinocentric. Nominally yes, but in practice it was a very nebulous concept that allowed for some flexibility in organising its foreign affairs; pretty much everyone was considered a tributary in the Qing worldview as long as they had any interaction not covered by formalised structures and rules of engagement.
Providing tribute was more an action than a status per se and was two-sided as well, states such as Ryukyu and Korea would have sent tribute missions once a year or more, but others would be sent at far sparser intervals and did not always involve explicit demonstrations of deference to the Qing state. The Qing might categorise them as "tributaries", but in practice a lot of the states covered under that definition set the terms of the relationship, and maintained a whole lot of their regional autonomy vis-a-vis China.
The precise causes of the Opium Wars were not amazingly sympathetic, but ultimately they, or something very much like them, were inevitable; the only way the Qing were ever going to start taking international relations seriously was to have their teeth kicked in.
The precise causes of the Opium Wars not being very sympathetic is primarily what I meant. On a larger scale, I think it should be clear by the tone of the rest of the section that I don't view the Qing in all of that as solely a "passive victim of colonialism". I do tend to agree the Qing getting its teeth kicked in was inevitable, and maybe even good in the long run. The High Qing period was a period in which China was legitimately too successful for its own good - after the elimination and assimilation of any regional competitors via their annexation of Xinjiang, they developed a highly ineffective bureaucracy that saw them crippled by interest groups to the extent they were still funding armies established in the seventeenth century. The Chinese state at this point had metastasised to the cusp of stagnation, and the century of humiliation in general was largely what broke all this down.
I also alluded to this, but there is also the fact that China itself at the time was a highly colonial state which ruled over many subjects not entirely happy with their rule (there's at least one instance of ethnic cleansing, with the Qianlong Emperor basically exterminating the Dzungars), and that's not exactly the kind of regime that can really object to colonialism.
Glad you liked it (in spite of the obvious rambliness).
I do recommend Beijing, though it can be overwhelming at times much of the architecture is so iconic that it's what you imagine when you think "China". And the Great Wall is worth everything, though probably steer away from the Badaling section since it's the one all the Chinese tourists go to (in contrast I've heard good things about Jinshanling, which receives few tourists, and you get to walk on both restored and unrestored parts of the wall). But if you're really into history there's no place better than Shanxi province in my opinion, which will be the topic of next post.
I'd be interested to read the Vietnam/Cambodia writeup. I have some rather unkind opinions about Vietnam as well, there's an absolute lack of civic-mindedness on the streets and roads; I hear from most that the experience in Cambodia is rougher and the sense of stagnation is much worse.
I do agree that Chinese tourism is a big thing; due to the massive population some of the more major sites can get swarmed with very urban hanfu-wearing tourists trying to take selfies and this kind of confounds the vibe (Malaysia deals with a much lower tourism burden). But that's also not incompatible with the fact that many of these temples are also active religious spaces for the community.
Hell, the Yonghe Temple in Beijing is a famous touristy one too. Perhaps I was lucky, but when I was there, I barely saw the hanfu girls that were all over the Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven in droves and instead there was a lot of incense-burning, people generally engaging in worship and a very big Tibetan monk community. It was really interesting. But IME even largely tourist temples (e.g. Datong's Hanging Temple) still have offerings left by people who just take whatever they have on their person like a water bottle, candy, etc and place it on the altar, which suggests some level of ritual adherence even among tourists.
The experience is also probably dependent on what subsection of China you go to; the country is super heterogenous and there's urban/rural and regional divides. Rural areas have greater adherence, and generally Hokkien Chinese (which constitute a large portion of Malaysian Chinese) tend to be more religious. Fujian province in particular is well known for its massive communal ceremonies, example here. All of the stuff in that video pretty much has the right vibe to me.
Not been to Nanjing yet, but I would love to (I have generally wanted to visit Jiangnan for a while). Anything in particular you would recommend doing there? I'm aware it's one of the Chinese walled cities and there's some Ming mausoleums + Taiping Heavenly Kingdom history, but that's all I really know about it.
I... actually generally agree with your point, have been against this stupid war for the entire time it's been happening, and find myself similarly frustrated with many of the Amerikaposters here tribalistically supporting whatever they do. I am really not in favour of US foreign interventionism (which is long and storied) and have never been regardless of the partisan-political alignment of who's doing it.
The routine blanket portrayal of any country that's not in line with the American regime (not just Iran either, which I would consider more of a defensible position) as a dysfunctional backstabbing low-trust low-skill low-human-capital Third World hellhole is also not helping my sympathy for the pro-Americans, especially since it's so aggressively out of line with a lot of what I've seen in my expeditions travelling and living in many countries.
But yeah, this tone is going to get you banned. And I'm saying this because I think you're directionally correct and would rather you not get banned.
I am finally writing my trip report to China. There is so much ground to cover and things to discuss that I have barely described my first 2-and-a-half days in the country and the word count is 6,571, somewhere about half the word count of my entire Vietnam trip report. This is going to take forever to write, and I've already cut out a ton of interesting historical detours and personal musings I could have written about.
I'm curious if it would be better to post here in instalments (say, one post per city, four posts in total) or in one go. With the level of detail I'm going into, a full post is going to be somewhere around 36,000 words.
I can't really compare cultural conditions in Malaysia to my part of India, but my brother is close to being maximally lucky in terms of what he can expect in these parts.
Same here; I come from a relatively liberal, atheistic family, though the same thing could not necessarily be said about the extended family. My immediate family have basically agreed it's a good idea not to tell them lest they Actually Die.
Ultimately, it's up to him and I'll help figure out how to make it work.
It's good he has supportive people like you helping him along.
I wouldn't go that far, honestly. India isn't Uganda or Saudi Arabia. He could probably cohabit with another man and dodge questions indefinitely, unless he publicly declares that he's married to a man and starts making out in public. Even then, I think he could get away with not much greater risk to life and limb.
It has less to do with life and limb (I didn't perceive that as anything other than a remote risk) and more to do with my uncertainty about how sustainable the situation really was in the long run; for example whether the extended family would ever seriously pressure him to get a wife and child or something similar. Extricating yourself from pointed questions about that is a bit more difficult when you regularly see them, and there's less of an excuse to not show proof of whatever you lie to them about. Admittedly this was also based on a bunch of stereotypes about the extremely close-knit and privacyless nature of Indian extended families which I imagined would have made it harder. Or maybe that's just representative of the type of Indian who chooses to migrate to Malaysia.
But if the family situation is such that you can indefinitely deflect it and get away with not telling your extended family anything, then yes, ignore that part of the comment; the calculus changes significantly. Though the ban on commercial surrogacy is definitely still a consideration.
Thank you. He really doesn't want me to walk on eggshells around him, or to treat him any differently. I don't intend to.
I think this is one of these attitudes that's very common among gay people who don't centre their identity around being gay or relish using it as a social bludgeon against others, the type that doesn't care about being an Activist and mainly wants to live undisturbed as you've stated your brother does. The converse is depressingly common in some circles though - I was once in a friend group with a "non-binary" woman who compulsively engaged in such tactics to police people's behaviour, and it took a herculean effort for me to contain my disgust. I find myself so estranged from these people, it's almost as if I'm looking at a different species entirely.
I'm pretty much your brother except I'm in accounting and am more of an autist. Grew up in the third world, thick skin, very heterosexual-passing in attitude, zero patience for flamboyant and dramatic anybody. My circumstances probably don't apply to your brother and Malaysian Chinese might actually be more chill than Indians about this, but I came out to my immediate family relatively early in life (in spite of my sister seeming to find it very weird and barely speaking to me about anything relationship-adjacent even today), and I hold my extended family at enough arms length that I don't really have to tell them honestly what I'm up to. I could not be more happy to not have to deal with female bullshit in dating, and am currently in a very committed long distance relationship with a bisexual guy (note I've already met his mother, it's a serious thing, there is a plan down the line to actually move in together).
In other words, it's possible to actually make this work. I second the advice of expanding his social circle into countries that are more accepting of these things, the more widespread buy-in there is to the idea of the Rainbow Identities, ironically enough the more normal the open homosexuals become. It's a consequence of social pressure that only the people who are super comfortable being openly gay in places like India are also probably not the kinds of people you would want to partner up with ever, virtually everyone else that's more normal is also less likely to be contrarian and radical for the sheer sake of it and as a result more susceptible to the pressure to conform. But don't rush into anything after a breakup. It's a recipe for bad decisions you'll just end up regretting. And bars dedicated to the Rainbow Community are never good places for finding long-term commitment.
Ultimately though, there's an inherent tradeoff between staying in India and being close to one's same-sex partner. You can't have it all in that regard. And keeping a relationship under wraps while pretending to be asexual or having a lavender marriage is a half-measure that's likely to involve a lot of deception and will probably be ridiculously exhausting after a while. I'm not sure how easy it is for him to keep his extended family at length in the same way I do, or to fail to inform them of goings on in his life. But in my experience being overseas makes the act of deflection way easier. I just lie to my extended family about my life every now and then, and barely think about them again. He's got you and your mother to back him up, which also makes any spiel he spins more convincing.
As an aside, you should not feel that bad about making gay jokes. You've been supportive, and if he tells you it's fine I see no reason to disbelieve him. I make quite extreme and very slur-filled jokes in that caliber all the time with close company, and can relate to seriously not wanting someone I know to tiptoe around me for fear of hurting my feelings. It can be very condescending to feel like you're being coddled or unintentionally forcing someone to self-censor when you would just prefer they be themselves, to the point that every time I get a sense that any of my friends are doing that I sometimes push them in the direction of making these jokes. Probably not a good time at the moment since he may be going through a breakup soon, but just thought I would add that.
It's always been a trait that people consider positive, but there are tradeoffs and at least to my recollection, there was a time when a lower relative value was placed on its importance (specifically a certain era when a lot of story-based games came out, indie and triple-A alike). There's inherent tension between many of the goals a game can aspire to, and at the moment more emphasis seems to be placed on conceptual ideas based around "player agency", "nonlinearity", "replayability", and other such concepts that actively interfere with the ability to satisfyingly curate and pace a game. Rare is the game that actually manages to balance these goals.
I do agree that replayability makes a bit more sense for those time-rich and money-poor. But it's also somewhat dependent on whether you're personally receptive to the addiction-adjacent feedback loops that these games actively try to foster. I've been in this situation before, and still would not buy a game like that, my preference ranking tends to prioritise ephemeral but memorable experiences over less impactful experiences that can be stretched for longer. It doesn't take long for my enjoyment level of a game to hit the point where I have better things to look at and read and do, rather than play it for the 116th time. Your mileage may vary though.
In general, I have never understood this fixation on "content" and "replayability" in games and this denigration of linearity, which ends up being reflected in every new game trend ranging from roguelikes to open-world games to (most recently) immersive sims. It always just ends up feeling like yes, there's theoretically massive or even unbounded replayability, but in practice almost none of this variation is meaningful; it's the game equivalent of finding variation in a pine forest, ceaseless randomly-generated content featuring all of the same building blocks. Unless you're treating the game just as a tool to occupy your fingers, one's actual interest in it wanes very fast, and the prioritisation of endless "player agency" and endless "replayability" often means that you have to sacrifice any sense of satisfying pacing and progression. Don't even get me started on the de-prioritisation of meaningful narrative as a casualty of this focus. It's an approach that reduces games to absolute brainrot.
I really hate all of these terms that games get judged by now. It's almost as if we were having the whole Games As Art thing a while back where a lot of developers briefly tried to make games indistinguishable from movies with extra interactivity, and then we overcorrected quickly and basically treated games as glorified content farms, which we still haven't come back from after years and years of genericised slop. A lot of players have a serious problem with viewing games like a product, as if the measuring stick for a game's quality is how many hours one could theoretically get out of it, and this really fucks up how games get designed.
That is a good list.
I've been on a bit of a roll listening to gamelan lately (going to Singapore had something to do with it).
Gamelan is very nice. There's a few regional types extant in Indonesia; Balinese and Javanese are the major traditions. The one you posted (and the one that seems to have gotten popular among Western listeners) is the Balinese style, which I suppose is understandable since Bali was the first Indonesian island to be developed for international travellers, and it is fantastic - but I would actually say the Javanese style is the more elegant and delicate of the two. It's such an utterly alien sound and it even still gets played as court music in Yogyakarta, here's a pretty good example of what it's like. Indonesia generally has a lot of very fascinating regionalised culture, much of which doesn’t get exported.
There's also other musical traditions in Southeast Asia that stem from a similar root of "bronze gong culture", such as the piphat of Thailand, Laos, Burma, etc and the kulintang of the Philippines and Borneo. All worth checking out in my opinion.
How was Singapore, by the way?
Your post reminded me of a kora jazz piece that someone introduced me to in grad school.
Saved this one. West African fusion pretty much never fails to grab me.
You said no anime, but maybe non-anime Japanese material is fair game? I rather like some of Shiina Ringo's songs.
As long as it's sufficiently local and hasn't been globalised in the same way that anime has (Nintendo would not be an acceptable answer either), Japanoposting is fine. I see your Shiina Ringo, and raise you another obscure Japanese artist called JAGATARA, here's an exceptionally funky album from that band I particularly enjoy.
Some good things come of this, like this appropriation of a Thai-adjacent people's choral tradition for dark techno game BGM.
It's not all too common to see modern Mainland Chinese media mentioned in forums, so you get extra points for that. Been getting into a good amount of Chinese music too myself; there's a surprising amount of fantastic media from China that goes virtually unnoticed like the underground Beijing and Wuhan punk/post-punk scenes. RE-TROS is a particular favourite of mine, here and here are two songs of theirs.
There's been a lot of posts here about Mainland China's lack of global cultural appeal and why this is the case; I've been meaning to make a post in the Fun Thread detailing some excellent Mainland Chinese media that I think people should check out (for example the Shanghai Animation Film Studio's 20th century works of ink-wash animation are beautiful in a distinctly Chinese way), but I'm lazy. The sheer amount of important media properties that are only culturally relevant in China and receives no traction outside of that sphere is staggering.
Chinese poetry is absolute crack, though I hear not knowing Chinese kind of takes the teeth out of them. A lot of them are based in the peculiarities of the Chinese language and are thus untranslatable.
The cat poem you quoted is even funnier in context, by the way, because that's a Southern Song poem. Song Chinese were absolute ailurophiles, and they even had cat contracts known as namaoqi (納貓契) specifying the cat's obligations to its owner and vice versa, signed with a paw print. Here is such an example where the cat agrees to patrol tirelessly, catch mice, and leave the numnums alone.
In my experience China to this day is full of cats roaming freely as well, the country is practically covered in them. They prowl sections of the Great Wall, climb over pagodas, and so on: they're just everywhere.
Transnational Media Thread
Any local art, music, film, etc you've been consuming from far-flung parts of the globe? (No, anime doesn't count, that shit has been thoroughly mainstreamed and globalised by now.)
For my part, I've been enjoying quite a lot of Mande music as of late (basically the folk musical tradition of Mali that began with the 13th century Mali empire). They developed a highly polyphonic music style independently from Western traditions, passed down through the centuries by hereditary griot storytellers; their music was modernised in the 1970s, fusing quite a lot with other styles. One of my favourite artists to play in this tradition is Toumani Diabate, a ridiculously prolific musician who specialises in the kora, a 21-stringed instrument that falls somewhere between a lute and a harp. Here is a particularly nice example of traditional kora music from him, and here and here are examples of some of the fusion he has produced. I find there's an exceptionally atmospheric, almost mystical sound to a lot of this music I can't get enough of.
When it comes to art, traditional Song Dynasty handscroll paintings are just incredible. Yes, I am continuing my recent trend of Sinoposting, deal with it. They were painted on these massive pieces of silk meant to be slowly unravelled from right to left, revealing different parts of the painting as it went along. Probably the most famous one in existence is Zhang Zeduan's impossibly detailed 12th century Along The River During The Qingming Festival, depicting the commotion in the Song capital Kaifeng during the Tomb Sweeping Day. Other art in this vein is the extremely fluent 13th century Nine Dragons handscroll by Chen Rong, Composing Poetry on a Spring Outing by Ma Yuan, and Water Map by Ma Yuan, a uniquely liminal painting focusing on the rendition of water textures. (For Water Map, here are all the panels in the handscroll presented individually; I can't find it in the University of Chicago's archive of scrolls, and the one on Wikimedia is so large that it's capable of causing your browser to stall, and zooms in too much).
EDIT: A funny detail in the Nine Dragons scroll is the overabundance of Emperor Qianlong's massive seals and even poems throughout the body of the painting. While it's actually desirable to place seals on paintings - in fact Chinese paintings often leave spaces for stamps for collectors to leave their mark, with seals being a sign of history and provenance, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it, and Qianlong was unfortunately a prolific art connoisseur who had no sense of taste himself. I'm pretty sure I've heard him called "Stamp Demon" before in Chinese.
YOU are bombing a civilian population, unleashing toxic rain on them, destroying their desalination facilities, generally committing war crimes and crimes against humanity while your "president" gloats with all the wit of a stunted 8 year old sadist.
The hypocrisy of it also annoys the absolute piss out of me, considering the sheer amount of criticism the US levels at virtually every other country for exercising any degree of regional power (unless they're US vassals, then it's all okay). Russia is bad for starting shit with Ukraine after NATO threatened to expand into the literal historic core of Kievan Rus without so much as a pretence of a buffer zone. China is bad because of Hong Kong and why can't they stop being mean to Taiwan and something something territorial claims in the South China Sea.
It is, apparently, A-OK for America and its allies to ceaselessly fuck with Afghanistan, fuck with Libya, fuck with Venezuela, fuck with Iran and destabilise or outright destroy countless other societies while justifying it all with flimsy excuses or worse, invoking their Civilising Mission of proselytising Democracy, Whiskey and Sexy to rescue these poor unwashed natives from their state of barbarism (this is even applied to countries whose material conditions could not be further from their own, and where instituting an America-esque "liberal democracy" is barely feasible and cannot work). It is a national pastime for Americans, producing propaganda to justify their endless imperialism around the world while at the same time condemning when regional powers attempt to exercise influence over their immediate geopolitical sphere without the US's permission.
I'm not a leftist (I have spilled enough ink in the process of explaining how much I dislike them), but the only thing I do agree with the hippie crowd on is that US foreign intervention is absolute poison. And that's not to mention their laughable domestic politics, the likes of which they regularly export anywhere they have even the slightest amount of influence. Just unconscionable, the fact that such a country is a hegemon is disgraceful.
CBO suggests that hypersonic missiles may be traveling below Mach 5 in the terminal phase.
Speeds can be possibly below Mach 5, yes, it depends on the IRBM in question. If you believe the Ukrainian reports on the Oreshnik, it has a terminal velocity of Mach 11, well within the hypersonic range.
But even if the ballistic missile in question travels at only supersonic speeds in its terminal phase, HVPs still can't hit them. Note that due to the limitations of HVP the study here does not even bother to engage it with weapons that come close to the speed of IRBMs, note in this model the offence is utilising anti-ship missiles that are "subsonic and supersonic", not hypersonic. The authors go so far as to state "Due to the inability for the HVP to engage supersonic targets, an HVP-only configuration for anti-missile defense is not recommended" and therefore limit HVP engagement only to the subsonic targets in the simulation.
Right, on a ship it is part of a layered defense against large salvos. If they had run the simulation against a salvo size of one, the savings would look different: they estimate each HPV costing $100,000, with an ESSM (the low-end missile) costing over $600,000. So if your options are a five-round burst from your 5-inch or a single ESSM, you're looking at a 20% saving to deal with a single leaker.
Yes, you're potentially capable of saving large percentages when you're looking at small salvo sizes that the HVP can hit. This is not always the situation you are looking at, and you cannot utilise HVP against supersonic missiles, as admitted by the study itself. It may be able to be used instead of a more expensive missile, but if that salvo size of one is travelling at a high enough speed, using HVP to intercept it is not prudent, and you cannot rely on the assumption that the offence will use a missile the HVP can deal with.
Ultimately, the end effect of utilising HVPs like that is that you are capable of making the enemy waste some resources by forcing greater reliance on supersonic missiles in certain specific contexts where it would not otherwise have been used. It's an interesting technology capable of subtly shifting the balance of power in certain contexts, but I don't find myself particularly convinced that it will revolutionise missile defence wholesale or shift the cost balance anywhere near parity.
I don't think missile defence is intractable, but it is very difficult.
My recollection was the US was getting comfortable using 1 missile for certain types of targets
News to me if so, perhaps true for certain types of targets but I'm not confident that extends to many of the ballistic missiles types being used at the moment (MRBM/IRBM).
The US Navy is also porting the hypervelocity projectile (originally intended for a railgun) over to its five-inch gun. The HVP is assessed to be capable of dealing with ballistic missiles (it's guided) and it is likely, if produced at scale, to be much cheaper than a ballistic missile.
This would be significant if HVP was capable of intercepting ballistic missiles at any meaningful rate by itself. But according to your source it travels at Mach 3, limiting what it can be used for (IRBM terminal velocity can be somewhere in the range of Mach 16).
This study is attempting to assess the feasibility of using HVP as an augment to current ship loadouts instead of used on its own, the model in use here combines HVP as part of a larger defence system alongside "analogues for the SM-6, designated in the simulation as “Taller”, the SM-2/SM-2ER (“Lancer”), Enhanced Sea Sparrow (“Robin”), and the Phalanx Close-In-Weapons-System (CIWS) (“Pillbox”). The ships defend against anti-ship missiles consisting of analogues of four types of sub-sonic and super-sonic enemy weapons".
Note also that the other interceptors it's being paired with are not cheap and ship VLS units utilise many of these, with the Ticonderoga Class Cruiser boasting "12 Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), three Standard Missile-2 Extended Range (SM-2ER), 56 Standard Missile-2 Medium Range (SM-2MR), 12 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM), 10 Standard Missile-3 (SM-3), 32 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM), six Vertical Launch Antisubmarine Missile (VLA), and eight Harpoon missiles". HVP is just meant to be included as a component part of a whole package, which is very expensive.
In addition, they didn't know what the kill rate for HVP was due to the newness of the technology, so they just made assumptions about its probability of intercepting a target. "With the probability of hit and kill for the HVP unknown, simulation runs were created for an HVP probability of hit of 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3." And even using these assumptions, using a three round burst the inclusion of HVP increases salvo destroyed by.... 7.8% (this only applies to salvos of 75 missiles and above; it has a negligible effect on salvos sized 50 and below), using a five round burst it has an effect of 12%.
And as for the savings of HVP? It varies depending on salvo size, size of round and assumed kill rate, but for the most part they're not large, featuring savings in expended munitions like a cost of $284.7m being reduced to $279.7m, and other cost reductions in that ballpark (it bears noting that use of HVP increases costs in some contexts, particularly the ones where they carry the highest benefits wrt salvo destruction). The savings aren't nothing, but I'm unconvinced that they meaningfully alter the defence-offence asymmetry, and I'm very unconvinced it does anything when it comes to ballistic missiles capable of achieving super- or hypersonic speeds.
This is what the US is currently trying to do but it's easier said than done, since there are many supply chain bottlenecks; you would need to scale production not only of the interceptors but also of their component parts like solid rocket motors and guidance seekers, which are quite underproduced. You'd need to significantly expand the base of skilled personnel and factory capacity across the supply chain, not only at Lockheed Martin but also at BAE Systems, Boeing, Northrop, L3Harris and virtually anyone else involved, and many of these industries are hyperconsolidated as fuck. Many microelectronics, minerals and rare earths used in these interceptors are inherently limited in supply and also heavily leans on foreign sources, particularly China, which is a gigantic dependency of the US. And even then there's a limit to cost reduction through economies of scale.
Also, having quality uncertainties in something as critical as interceptors is a horrible idea even if you can manufacture a lot of them; having a somewhat accurate idea of your capabilities is crucial to war strategy.
Because, for the above reasons, it's super costly and the US can't commit infinite money to building and maintaining these. Also, you need to test every very complex component rigorously; quality control is not optional when the alternative is a missile taking out crucial infrastructure or killing hundreds/thousands. A single component failing rounds of testing can sometimes lead to production being halted out of QC concerns.
The "price" of interceptors, which we historically haven't bought huge numbers of, might have a lot of room to go down.
I doubt it, at least I certainly doubt it will equalise any time soon.
This source isn't exactly analogous to the situation in Iran and the Gulf since it largely deals with ICBMs in a nuclear-war scenario, but it is a pretty good attempt at assessing the difficulty of defence vs offence especially in a situation requiring moving large warheads long distances, and it turns out the unit cost of an ICBM is $42m if you include maintenance costs, launch facilities and other sundry expenses. On the other hand, missile defence systems such as Aegis Ship boast an estimated unit cost of $60m, Aegis Ashore has a unit cost of $258m, and NGI interceptors have unit costs of $487m after factoring in support and maintenance. The cost differential between offence and defence is massive, and if you want to filter out 90% of warheads shot you have to spend anywhere near 8-70 times as much as your attacker (8 times is a very best case scenario, 70 times is more realistic).
Because you're literally hitting a bullet with a bullet (PAC-3 and THAAD are both hit-to-kill) and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in their terminal phase can move at speeds of Mach 8-16? The extraordinary precision required to achieve interception is a pretty big technical feat that requires a lot of cost and time and stress-testing, including some very powerful avionics and computers that need to be not only small but deal with the conditions of being in a missile flying at Mach 8 and still working.
It's also the reason why defence is ultimately a losing game and why attrition is so effective.
Reported as AAQC.
The government says otherwise, but I would be shocked if there's more than 2 weeks of air defense munitions left!
Yeah I wonder how much of their stock of interceptors they've already burned through. The Gulf states are said to have intercepted 521 ballistic missiles out of 538 with an accuracy rate of 97% in the first four days of war; the unsaid part is that they're usually using 2 or more interceptors per missile in order to achieve that rate. That's 1042 interceptors burned through on the very generous low end, or 260.5 per day. The current rate of production of PAC-3 is 600 per year, and THAAD is even more anaemic - at 96 per year (though Lockheed has stated it wants to step it up to 400, it's unclear if it can). In other words, in the first four days they've consumed a year and a half's worth of interceptor production, it's likely the Gulf's stockpiles are running down fast. During the previous 12-day war the US burned through a quarter of its THAAD supply, and that was a relatively short war; interceptors are an extremely scarce resource.
Then again, Iranian missile facilities are also being bombed which limits its ability to wage a war of attrition, so it's going to be interesting to see which side wins the numbers game in the end. You better cross your fingers and hope Iran runs out before you do.
I'm going to be honest, this conversation has been quite bizarre. You're just stating the same few points over and over again even after they get addressed and outright citing things that contradict your points.
It's a pattern that we saw again, and again, and again throughout the cold war, and repeated again just this week, as American air power effortlessly dismantled Iranian/Russian air defense systems and shot down their missiles.
As I said, you guys want China to be the USSR so badly. I don't think this viewpoint is correct at all.
Which is to say- when American defense contractors say that, say, all recent tests of GBMD against ICBMs were successful, with an estimated 97% chance to kill when using multiple interceptors,
This is not a rate of “1 per warhead”. The 97% chance to kill is based off multiple interceptors, thus we come back to the main problem about defence being much harder than offence. Yes, you can push kill rates to arbitrarily high levels so long as the number of interceptors you can use against a warhead are unbounded. Though to do that would be completely infeasible since it also results in an insanely high cost. And that 97% figure is also questionable in a more statistically-based sense, since that figure assumes that each warhead's failure is independent - so if each munition has a kill probability of 56% then four will give you a probability of 97%. But failures could well be correlated, if e.g. they are caused by bad weather. Test successes are also conducted under ideal circumstances and usually don't feature bad weather, night-time conditions, and don't tend to include countermeasures that an opponent would likely utilise in a real-life scenario.
If you don't believe them, that's fine,
I do largely rely on the current reported figures, and they are the basis for why I think comprehensive missile defence is not a workable idea. More so, what I really don't believe in are the massive future promises of “swear to God guys, we have X and Y and Z in the pipeline, it's going to be amazing”, followed by the American public’s tendency to blow these things out of proportion even more than the government does. You are exceptionally bullish on the idea of an orbital interceptor in spite of the large number of physical obstacles that plague the concept.
It's funny also that you talk about the "American culture of openness" that allows flaws to be exposed, and meanwhile all the American theorists that are openly talking about the near-impossibility of mounting a comprehensive nuclear defence are straight-up being ignored within this very discussion. A culture of openness does not help you get a better or more sober picture of your actual capabilities if you just believe whatever you want in the end and artificially glaze everything American by default.
How's Artemis going, by the way?
but it does seem like China believes that their only hope is to massively increase their arsenal to overcome missile defense by raw numbers.
Which is pretty much all they need to do, given the inherent asymmetry in nuclear warfare. The house always wins. Why spend so much on fancy R&D in this case when a simple solution suffices?
You say that all China does is toothless posturing to make itself look good on the international stage, but that’s explicitly not what they are doing here - this is simply the most efficient, least flashy possible response to your geopolitical rival building interceptors, and ironically here you are criticising them for not trying to score publicity and optics points over the US with vanity projects that only waste time and money. It's not about trying to impress you, it's just a decision that makes perfect sense.
And I barely even have a horse in this race! I’m neither Mainland Chinese or American and don’t really have strong identification with one of these world powers. But this confidence that the U.S. can steamroll the world is folly.
That's not quite what I was asking- I wanted to know, how much does it cost to produce a nuclear warhead? Is there even a number?
It's in the study evaluating costs of defence vs. offence. The total unit cost is $42m including maintenance costs, launch facilities and other sundry expenses. On the other hand, missile defence systems such as Aegis Ship boast an estimated unit cost of $60m, Aegis Ashore has a unit cost of $258m, and NGI interceptors have unit costs of $487m.
And, as your Wikipedia article notes, your legacy GMDs cost $75m each, though that's not directly comparable since I'm not certain that's adjusted for inflation to 2023 dollars like those in the study are, I'm not sure it includes maintenance costs, and so on.
These are significant cost differences.
Based on the 90% effectiveness that we're currently seeing in tests, the worst case would be $500 billion.
90% is not the actual cited kill rate for an individual GMD interceptor, which is what the $500 billion is based off, so you're using the wrong number there. The single shot probability of kill is estimated by your own source at 56%, which puts us much closer to the 70-times-the-offence's cost range.
And the dollar values provided in the study don't really matter themselves, rather, it's the ratio of spending between the defender and attacker you should focus on. I'm not certain that when there's an escalation of hostilities the US can actually outspend China 70 times over to ensure its own defence.
And even if it can, 10% of all warheads fired will still hit the US.
The Multiple Kill Vehicle program is, as far as I can tell, still being worked on.
It's not. It was discontinued alongside the RKV (a technology it was dependent on).
The Golden Dome plan is to put interceptors in orbit, destroying ICBMs before they can launch MIRVs, which drastically changes the cost balance.
It doesn't and it's a bad idea. Please refer to my previous comment.
You shouldn't assume that technology will remain forever stuck in the 1980s! (unless, of course, you're Russia, in which case I guess it will...)
This is basically invoking magical science fiction handwavium. If you want your projections of the future to be largely based off wishful thinking about how the US is going to skyrocket and dominate the world, then fine, but I would prefer to base it off something more concrete.
I don't see how China is able to stop that at all. For every single country where they've invested money in business contracts to build soft power, the US can simply topple their government at any time it wishes. I'm not saying it should do this... but it could.
The discussion we've been having is pertinent to this point. Your assertion that it's capable of doing this is partially based on the US' purported ability to scare every other nuclear power into submission by swinging its dick around and showing off the sheer strapping size of its arsenal (that it can supposedly use at will without sustaining significant losses itself), so the above discussion is very relevant.
And just because China isn’t keen on exporting democratic-socialism-with-Chinese-characteristics around the world, doesn’t start war every time the US intervenes in overseas affairs, and is capable of making elementary cost-benefit calculations does not mean that it won’t react once the US treads on what it considers as its core sphere of influence.
EDIT: added more
I was not planning to write such a long comment when I initially entered this discussion, but here we go I guess.
It seems to me you're arguing for a basically binary view of nuclear deterrance, correct? That is, either a nation has enough nukes to deter, or it does not. A mere 300 warheads would deter all of NATO, and any more than that is simply a waste of money. That does seem to be the strategy chosen by China during the Cold War, and I suppose it worked well enough for them, but the US and USSR continued to build more and more warheads- was that just a complete waste in your thinking?
I'm not arguing for the opinion that it's binary, even NK's relatively paltry stack of nukes is enough to meaningfully affect geopolitics. I'm arguing that there are serious diminishing returns to increasing your stockpile of nukes after a certain threshold is crossed, whereas the costs scale relatively linearly. And in response to your question about whether the US and USSR's Cold War stockpiling was excessive and wasteful, my answer would be yes_chad.jpg. I do recommend the book Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 if you want a look into the arbitrary and downright instinctual fashion in which these decisions were made, in which "[l]ogic and fiscal accountability were subordinated to uncertainty, fear, interservice rivalries, pork-barrel politics, and an ultimately futile attempt to maintain the upper hand in the face of unimaginable destruction." There were many points in which these decisions were outright made on gut feel.
Indeed, China no longer seems to pursue that strategy. Instead, they seem to be rapidly expanding their nuclear arsenal, which seems to indicate that they do not feel safe with just a minimal deterrance- perhaps that was only driven by their 20th century poverty? The only nations that seem to rely on an absolutely minimal nuclear deterrance are the very small, poor nations like North Korea, Pakistan, and China in the 1960s. To me, that sounds like what the kids call "cope" rather than an actual strategy.
Yes, if your enemy begins producing interceptors, that changes the calculus and you will need to produce more if you want to be able to maintain that deterrent effect. It's not your arsenal vs. their arsenal for the most part, especially since even if you have perfect information on the locations of all their nuclear sites and have orders of magnitude more nukes than they do there is no way to stop a power with satellites from seeing all these hundreds of ICBMs getting launched and second-striking before their ability to do so is removed forever. It's more your arsenal vs. their interceptors, and that arms race is one that's heavily biased towards offence.
And you know. I guess France isn't a thing. They have maintained approx 290 warheads ever since 1992 under a minimal-deterrence strategy, and throughout this period France was not a "very small, poor nation".
Nowadays? And in the near future? The math seems different. Interceptors are accurate enough that it's approaching 1 per warhead, especially with Multiple Kill Vehicle technology.
I hate to ask, but what is your source for the idea that it's "approaching 1 per warhead"? And which MKV project are you referring to: the one that was carried out in 2008 and then discontinued due to restructuring, or the one that was revitalised in 2015 and then discontinued again in 2019, both of which we certainly do not have enough data on in order to assert a ratio of 1:1?
And THAADs? They travel at Mach 8 and have an effective range of around 124 miles. They were not intended to intercept ICBMs and have never been tested against them, which would comprise much of the relevant warheads in such a scenario. At most, THAADs have successfully intercepted IRBMs, which travel at relatively slow speeds. ICBMs often reach up to speeds of Mach 20 in its terminal phase and become more difficult to intercept as a result (any terminal-phase interceptor will have to contend with that). Interception by slower missiles is not strictly impossible, but the odds of success would likely not be high. Meanwhile, the kill rates of GMDs are far lower than 100%.
You appear to treat everything from China with the utmost suspicion as propaganda and everything from the US with the utmost bullishness, based on an unshakeable idea that everything will turn out roses for the US in the end. This is, ironically enough, a very late Qing Dynasty-like attitude. I don't think China's military technology is on par with the US yet, but one thing I will say is that they understand national humiliation intimately and see it as a distinct possibility even now, and you don't. Yet.
MIRVs might not be super expensive, but they're not cheap either- I genuinely have no idea whether it's easier to build an interceptor or a nuclear warhead at this point.
I have read about this before, and there's been a lot of work done assessing the feasibility of comprehensive nuclear defence from a cost perspective. Here is an example of such a study, attempting to estimate how much the defender would need to spend relative to the offender to reach an overall system efficiency of 90%. A lot of assumptions are made, but even if you go with a very high individual interceptor kill rate of 90% with perfect decoy discrimination, the asymmetry in cost is staggering. And this analysis even excludes the cost of space and ground-based sensors needed by the defender!
"A hypothetical scenario is analyzed in which the United States has a functioning BMD technology and enough interceptors to distribute them in a two-layer defense with the overall system efficiency of 90%, as targeted by U.S. war planners. It is assumed that the attacker has enough missiles to deliver a range between 500 and 6000 warheads to the continental United States. Results show that in the most optimistic case for the defender, with a very high individual interceptor kill effectiveness of 90% and with perfect decoy discrimination capability, the United States would need to spend on average 8 times more than the attacker, for a total cost between $60 billion and $500 billion. With a more realistic individual interceptor effectiveness of 50% and if the system is unable to discriminate against decoys, the United States would need to spend on average 70 times more, for a total cost between $430 billion and $5.3 trillion."
Note that even with this overall system efficiency of 90%, anywhere "between 50 and 600 warheads would still be expected to leak through the defence layers and reach the United States, causing massive destruction and long-term humanitarian consequences."
Say it with me: There is no possibility of comprehensive missile defence in the near future.
And if Golden Dome succeeds- and I see no reason why it can't!- then the calculus completely shifts, to where one orbital interceptor can take out an entire ICBM full of warheads before it has time to launch or separate.
I could write a whole thing, but really just read this, which explicitly addresses Golden Dome and why the Israel defence against Iran cannot be used as any kind of nuclear-war analogue. I will just quote portions of relevant sections:
"Any defense interceptors based in orbit will continually move with respect to the Earth, requiring that many platforms be deployed to have one near a missile launch site at all times. For example, about 1600 interceptors would be required in orbit to ensure that just one would be in position to engage a single solid-fuel ICBM launched from Russia, China, North Korea or Iran. Taking multiple shots against multiple ICBMs launched from the same area on Earth would increase proportionately the number of on-orbit interceptors needed. Because the cost-exchange ratio strongly favors the offense, even a less capable adversary could overwhelm the system by building more missiles. Space-based lasers would be vulnerable to preemptive attack and would suffer from limits on beam strength, control, and propagation of laser light through the atmosphere— limits that caused the United States to abandon efforts to develop an airborne laser for missile defense, which is much less technically challenging than a space-based laser. These factors led the 2012 National Academies’ review to conclude that "boost-phase missile defense whether kinetic or directed energy, and whether based on land, sea, air, or in space—is not practical or feasible” and to recommend that “the Department of Defense should not invest any more money or resources in systems for boost-phase missile defense.”"
"Indeed, a report by the American Physical Society released in March, which included a review of the effectiveness of missile defenses in countering the 2024 Iranian missile attacks, stated that “creating a reliable and effective defense against even the small number of relatively unsophisticated nuclear-armed ICBMs that we considered remains a daunting challenge. The difficulties are numerous, ranging from the unresolved countermeasures problem for midcourse warhead-intercept to the severe reach vs. time problem of boost-phase missile intercept.” It concluded that “our analysis of published work has led us to conclude that few of the main challenges involved in developing and deploying a reliable and effective ballistic missile defense have been solved, and that many of the hard problems we have identified are likely to remain unsolved during, and probably beyond, the 15-year time horizon we considered.”"
There are fundamental physical and logistical limitations to missile defence, and without engaging with these severe issues any highly optimistic predictions about China running out of options to hurt the US is basically fanfiction.
In the 20th century, that would have met massive blowback from the USSR. In the early 21st century, it would have meant an endless slog against insurgents armed by Iran. Now? China seems powerless to do anything. They can't even make good propaganda like the USSR could. They could, at best, defend themselves in an all-out nuclear war like you're talking about. For anything else? The US can do what it wants.
What makes you think China is at all interested in playing World Police like the U.S. and USSR?
Thanks for all the recommendations. I am also strongly considering Taishan in a future trip to China, not only for the Daimiao's 62-metre long mural of the God of Taishan with his procession and the hike up the sacred mountain, but also for other things nearby - I hear the Lingyan Temple nearby Jinan is a really nice and expansive architectural complex with some preserved Song Dynasty arhat sculptures, a pagoda forest, and a very active monk community that doesn't attract all too many tourists.
Also not too worried about human DDOS because I travel at very off-peak times (I generally didn't find it too bad to be honest, Temple of Heaven and Terracotta Army were by far the worst in this regard).
Perhaps this is my personal hangups speaking, but it's weird because I wouldn't describe any of my extended family members as being particularly serious about religion. My perception was always that a lot of what they did read less like reverence and more like a Pascal's Wager type thing, as if they were probabilistically maximising their chances of good things happening to them (not that this is inherently bad, it's just quite a casual way to treat belief). But of course there's variation, and all of this is ultimately vibes and preference-based. I don't want to be too cynical either, because I ultimately see a lot of value in the culture and generally really like Malaysia, you can see my love letter to the Straits here.
As an aside, my favourite Chinese temple in Malaysia is the Khoo Kongsi in Georgetown. I really enjoy that one just because of all the art, and the fact that there's plaques of all the Khoos and their accomplishments which continue to be updated to this day gives it a sense of continuity and provenance.
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