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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26388 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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3/ China and Taiwan

This feels less likely than the previous two examples, mostly because there's no active conflict in the region yet so there are still several further stages of escalation that would need to be crossed before nuclear weapons become worth considering for anyone involved. The US also seems to be taking steps to reduce their dependence on Taiwan. On the other hand, the US is interested in countering Chinese influence for reasons that go beyond the situation with Taiwain, and if China starts making SK and Japan worried enough to think about establishing their own nuclear programs, the US might start to find its credibility in the region tested.

Reasons I'm shit-scared* about this one:

  1. The PRC probably has some sort of attack (not sure if it's invasion, bombardment, or general blockade) being prepared for 2024-5 if the US election is enough of a shitstorm - their plan to integrate Taiwan peacefully died a horrible screaming death when Xi Jinping did an "I am altering the deal" on Hong Kong, the US military is old but being modernised, and the shitstorm was obvious several years in advance and isn't necessarily going to recur afterward. As more direct evidence, the head of ASIS (Australia's equivalent of the CIA - note that Australia shares intel with the USA in the Five Eyes) said that "a linear path" leads to "great-power conflict" and he hopes leaders make decisions to take us off that path.
  2. If the ROW doesn't come in to defend Taiwan, the First Island Chain is broken - rather than being confined to the South China Sea and East China Sea (by sea mines in the various narrow straits in Indonesia/Malaysia/the Philippines/Taiwan/Japan), the PLAN gets to operate in the blue-water Pacific because of the ports on Taiwan's east coast. This is an existential threat to Japan and South Korea because their population densities are so high they require food imports to avoid mass starvation, so if Taiwan falls both of them will almost certainly withdraw from the NPT and acquire nuclear weapons in order to deter the PRC from blockading them in event of conflict (and thus allow them to have foreign policies that aren't dictated by the PRC by that threat). Also, if the PRC doesn't stop with Taiwan (and they likely won't; they've already started claiming the Ryukyu Islands) and WWIII happens anyway, it's going to be harder with Taiwan in PRC hands. As such, I give a high chance (about 80%) that the ROW does in fact come in, because nuclear proliferation sucks and if nuclear war's inevitable anyway we should have it on the best terms possible.
  3. I find it highly unlikely (about 10%) that a conventional conflict over Taiwan (with the USA in play) wouldn't go nuclear. The problem is that the PRC's nuclear deterrent is fairly fragile - the sea leg is strongly hampered by the aforementioned First Island Chain, the air leg doesn't have the range to reach the USA or Europe, and in event of conflict there would be enemy nukes quite close to almost all of China (the Bay of Bengal and India proper, Taiwan itself and the uncontested waters east of it, and South Korea, plus the bombers the USA would be heavily using anyway are nuclear-capable) so they'd get at most like 10 minutes of warning before their land leg was neutralised by the siloes being nuked (which the USA can do, because it's got a lot more nukes than the PRC does). This means the PLA would have to be on a hair-trigger in order for their deterrent to do anything, and the coalition would be strongly tempted to also be on a hair-trigger in order to perform such an alpha strike (and minimise the death toll) in event of an intercepted launch order or launches starting. Hair-triggers are bad, because they go off accidentally - see the Duluth bear and Vasily Arkhipov incidents for examples of the sort of things I'm thinking about. The chance of nuclear war per day is only like 1-2% (it would be less, but nobody would have launch-detection satellites because PLA doctrine for WWIII for decades has been to start out with massive ASAT use and that means Kessler syndrome wipes out all of LEO, and while there are backups they're not as reliable), but that adds up very fast.

It's a long way from assured, but the spectre of imminent WWIII hangs over the globe once more.

*Well, I'm not especially scared for my own life, because I took action to ensure I only die if we have total state failure - I live in Bendigo and have 20L of water in my bathroom cabinet. But I'm scared for other people's sake, and I'd have less creature comforts.

PRC's nuclear deterrent is fairly fragile

Fragile by nuclear superpower standards yes but not by anyone else's! They have many mobile ground-based launchers. It'll be an absolute pain to find them and target them quickly enough. The siloes are there to soak up inbound missiles away from Chinese population centres, not so much for second strike.

As of 2022 they've been installing JL-3s on their submarine arm, they can hit the US from home waters. Now Chinese subs are generally thought to be awful but I wouldn't want to be an American attack sub in the East China Sea. The Chinese have littered it with fixed underwater sensors, just like the US has festooned other parts of the Pacific with similar.

Chinese boomers can camp in the Bohai Sea and dare any foreign submarine to hunt them there.

acquire nuclear weapons in order to deter the PRC from blockading them in event of conflict

Does this work? Suppose you're South Korean president and you've got a few dozen recently-acquired A-bombs attached to short-range missiles. Are you going to demand that China refrain from sinking ships or you'll fire nukes at... what? The Chinese fleet? A Chinese airbase?

They could fire nukes back in greater number. Could you credibly threaten to go to strategic and start hitting Chinese cities, at which point your country would likely be razed? Only annexation by North Korea would make such a threat seem credible. It'd make more sense for South Korean leaders to accept some kind of satellite-relationship like Korea has usually had, Finlandization. Japan is a different story, they're relatively bigger and less exposed with more historical antipathy. Japan seems harder to subjugate.

As of 2022 they've been installing JL-3s on their submarine arm, they can hit the US from home waters.

Interesting.

Could you credibly threaten to go to strategic and start hitting Chinese cities, at which point your country would likely be razed?

Yes, this is what I meant. A general blockade of South Korea is an attempt to kill like 80% of its population via starvation; in that event there is no remaining Chinese capacity to deter SK from literally anything (starvation's a really-ugly way to go, so death by PLA nuke is arguably a mercy), so "we take you down with us in revenge" is fully credible (unlike the existing US nuclear umbrella, since a blockade of SK won't kill 80% of Americans). Of course, there's still the standard Chicken dynamic to deal with where the craziest has leverage, but that's true of literally all relations between unfriendly nuclear powers; the blockade's mostly irrelevant there. What SK nukes do is take it from "PRC has an unstoppable trump card short of nukes" to "normal nuclear brinkmanship".

if Taiwan falls both of them will almost certainly withdraw from the NPT and acquire nuclear weapons in order to deter the PRC from blockading them in event of conflict (and thus allow them to have foreign policies that aren't dictated by the PRC by that threat)

But wouldn't the South Koreans come to some kind of negotiated deal with China before it got to that point? If they see that the Chinese blockade won't be broken quickly enough to avoid hunger and malnutrition, wouldn't they come to terms? Maybe there'd be some phoney federal agreement with North Korea that looks good on paper but does nothing IRL, maybe they have to share technology with China and give up some air or naval bases.

That seems like a much better deal than a nuclear war or starvation.

One might equally say "wouldn't the Chinese back off the blockade before it got to that point? That seems like a much better deal than having their capital nuked."

Nuclear brinkmanship, as I said, is a game of Chicken. Risk-aversion cuts both ways.

Just to chime in here- Japan(and also Saudi Arabia, which seems relevant to a different scenario) has well defined plans to acquire nuclear weapons on short notice. If China looks to be winning in Taiwan Japan can likely conduct a nuclear test before China knows it’s actually working on them.

Do you have any sources that elaborate on Japan's plans and how much of that is validated vs speculation?

If I've understood you correctly you think that there's a 1-2% daily chance of nuclear exchange conditional on ROW joining a war between Taiwan and the PRC? Given an 80% chance of the ROW joining the war, this should work out to about 50-70% chance of a nuclear exchange by D-100 of a war. Not sure what your odds of the war breaking out at all in the next 5 years or so would be (presumably pretty high).

If I've understood you correctly you think that there's a 1-2% daily chance of nuclear exchange conditional on ROW joining a war between Taiwan and the PRC?

Yes. Maybe lower if Russia joins the war on the PRC's side, as the Russian deterrent is far less fragile in a number of ways (10x as many nukes, closer proximity to North America/Europe for the air leg (remember that the Arctic Ocean's only about five times the area of the Caribbean Sea, and is narrow in the direction connecting Russia to Canada), well-situated ports for the sea leg).

Not sure what your odds of the war breaking out at all in the next 5 years or so would be (presumably pretty high).

If I had to toss out a number I'd say 70%, but I'm a lot less confident in that than in the conditionals; I don't have direct access to the kind of intelligence reports on the internal memos of the CPC and PLA that I'd need to nail it down.

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