USA would inflect the most damage as it has more warheads and a better delivery system. But the damage it would still get in return would not make an exchange worth it.
MCMC_to_Serfdom on
Since I just know the Reddit habit of neither clicking the link or giving up at a paywall even though this is interesting – a paste with some cutting to provide incentive to go look properly
> Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), … wargame—to explore how a Sino-American nuclear war could break out.
> In the exercise scenario, it is 2032 and a war over Taiwan has been raging for 45 days. China uses “theatre” nuclear weapons—with a shorter range and smaller yield than the city-busting “strategic” missiles… The targets include Guam and Kwajalein Atoll…as well as an American aircraft-carrier strike group.
> Most people, not unreasonably, think of conventional weapons as being less escalatory and thus more usable than nuclear ones. But today’s low-yield nukes…can be delivered with extreme precision and less collateral damage.
> Weeks into a conflict, both sides would run short of conventional weapons. Theatre nuclear weapons … would also continue to work even if weeks of war had degraded the command, control and intelligence systems that conventional munitions rely on.
> The result of all this, in the wargame…: China was incentivised to use nuclear weapons first, despite its formal “No First Use” pledge, but once it did so, and in contrast with expectations for how a US-Soviet war…things did not necessarily spiral into an apocalyptic exchange of strategic nuclear weapons.
> The experts and officials playing as China had a wide range of military targets—Asia is chock-full of American facilities and naval assets. (Though there is little evidence that China possesses low-yield nukes right now.) The American team, by contrast, struggled with the fact that many of the most attractive targets for retaliation were on the Chinese mainland.
> Moreover, the players found that America did not have the weapons needed to hit the “very small number” of lower-risk targets—mostly warships and Chinese bases on disputed reefs in the South China Sea. Its most advanced non-nuclear missiles would have run out by day 45.
3 Comments
No one.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1xAIqDMW8dE&t=2361s&pp=ygUTd2hlbiB0aGUgd2luZCBibG93cw%3D%3D
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BvFu7Z5cc88&pp=ygUMdGhyZWFkcyAxOTg0
USA would inflect the most damage as it has more warheads and a better delivery system. But the damage it would still get in return would not make an exchange worth it.
Since I just know the Reddit habit of neither clicking the link or giving up at a paywall even though this is interesting – a paste with some cutting to provide incentive to go look properly
> Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), … wargame—to explore how a Sino-American nuclear war could break out.
> In the exercise scenario, it is 2032 and a war over Taiwan has been raging for 45 days. China uses “theatre” nuclear weapons—with a shorter range and smaller yield than the city-busting “strategic” missiles… The targets include Guam and Kwajalein Atoll…as well as an American aircraft-carrier strike group.
> Most people, not unreasonably, think of conventional weapons as being less escalatory and thus more usable than nuclear ones. But today’s low-yield nukes…can be delivered with extreme precision and less collateral damage.
> Weeks into a conflict, both sides would run short of conventional weapons. Theatre nuclear weapons … would also continue to work even if weeks of war had degraded the command, control and intelligence systems that conventional munitions rely on.
> The result of all this, in the wargame…: China was incentivised to use nuclear weapons first, despite its formal “No First Use” pledge, but once it did so, and in contrast with expectations for how a US-Soviet war…things did not necessarily spiral into an apocalyptic exchange of strategic nuclear weapons.
> The experts and officials playing as China had a wide range of military targets—Asia is chock-full of American facilities and naval assets. (Though there is little evidence that China possesses low-yield nukes right now.) The American team, by contrast, struggled with the fact that many of the most attractive targets for retaliation were on the Chinese mainland.
> Moreover, the players found that America did not have the weapons needed to hit the “very small number” of lower-risk targets—mostly warships and Chinese bases on disputed reefs in the South China Sea. Its most advanced non-nuclear missiles would have run out by day 45.