problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
I see it less in terms of "winning" the nuclear war, and more in terms of "which side has more freedom of action?" Having more nukes (as well as more ways of delivering them) buys the US considerablly more freedom of action. China is forced to evaluate everything as an all-or-nothing war for survival; the US has considerably more flexibility.
I seriously doubt this is the case, and I don't actually think this dynamic shows up in geopoliticking. If MAD is being deployed and the costs of a first strike are far too high on either side, then the "freedom of action" argument clearly fails. You're basically dooming yourself and your people (and many other countries) either way, with a not-insignificant chance of your own death; at the levels of destruction we're talking about here, it's kind of moot. Seriously, I doubt anybody is evaluating this with the geopolitical logic of "Well, 85% of my country is dead and large swaths of it will not be able to be livable for a good long while and there's possibly a nuclear winter going on, but 99.9% of your population is dead! Checkmate."
Even if China fired none of its nukes, which isn't likely, launching 3,700 nukes in their totality to totally decimate the country blows back on the US immediately and in a big way.
That no longer seems to be the case- as long as we're not actually attacking China directly, the US seems to have considerable freedom of action to do what it wants. We can stop their investments in South America, stop their oil purchases from Iran, ban their tech companies, and even topple governments that they were on friendly terms with. Even if we were to go invade North Korea tomorrow, what do you think China would do about it?
Again, the sheer number of nukes does not actually allow you more freedom of action. It's basically threatening an intense no-win scenario where outcomes on every side are so horrific it's unlikely any country would want to escalate to it.
The Hongqi-19 has never been tested in combat, and does not seem to be particularly more advanced than THAAD.
It has, at least on paper, several advantages over THAAD; being not only capable of longer range but higher altitudes and a superior radar system. And Pakistan has announced plans to acquire the HQ-19, so I guess we'll see how it fares in an in-practice scenario. Suffice to say I don't think THAAD is a particularly convincing or central point for your argument about US overwhelming military dominance.
problem_redditor
3hr ago
Or so they say, yes. Even so, in its presence or absence I doubt any major power would be retarded enough to start firing these things all over the place. MAD is a powerful deterrent.
The idea that the sheer number of nukes a country holds is the most important factor in an engagement is just silly; maintenance is costly and Russia and the US have so many nuclear bombs partially because of Cold War-era posturing. Strategically speaking, you don't actually need 2000+ nukes to do the job properly, it's not about saturation as much as it is having the capacity to hit enough targets to deter attacks. If you have even a nominal amount of nukes and a proper delivery system, that is more than enough. MAD doesn't need to be even close to total, if you wipe out the largest cities in the US the vast majority of its economy is gone in a handful of hours (and note, you'll not only kill people directly but also through the collateral damage such as complete collapse of infrastructure and radiation percolation into the water system).
Note that China has 600+ nukes, which would certainly be capable of levelling large swaths of the US; striking first is incredibly stupid. Theoretically you could remove their second strike capability by attempting an attack on their silos, but realistically you aren't going to be able to identify the locations of every Chinese silo and submarine and target them before China mounts its offence. Even if just 20 of China's most antiquated ICBMs hit the US, that's 50 million dead according to some possible ballpark estimates, how would you feel about 300? China certainly has enough for credible deterrence against the US, and that's largely what its nuclear arsenal appears to be designed for - out of the major nuclear powers, it's the only one that actually maintains an unconditional no-first-strike policy. Even so, of the nuclear powers it's the one scaling up production fastest.
And speaking of missile defence systems, China has the Hongqi-19, which has a reportedly superior maximum operational range (up to 500-600 km) compared to THAAD (200 km). Claiming "overwhelming nuclear dominance" such that it would allow the US to steamroll any country it feels like is premature, to say the least.
It really feels like the usual parade of cope and trope about China that has been circulating in the public discourse ever since it bootstrapped its way up from worse than sub-Saharan poverty to a world power in 45 years, all the while singlehandedly orchestrating the largest urban migration in human history and aggressively A/B testing their entire economy to see what worked and what didn't.
People really want this to be a Soviet Union situation where the regime is barely hanging on by a thread, only bolstering their public image via international propaganda, and where the dominance of the ever-so-enlightened USA will be assured in the end in some kind of teleological Francis Fukuyama-esque end-of-history sense "but tofu construction, but ghost cities, but CCP is going to collapse, but everything in China is fake". Their military technology at the moment lags slightly behind the US (though they're making huge strides in closing that gap), but their production pipelines and logistics are more streamlined and scalable, and yeah their population is massive.
Of course nobody can say for sure who would win in a scuff-up between the two, but I would not underestimate China.
At least in the circles I've run in, the idea of "cultured intellectualism" that sticks today has a lot to do with knowing prominent but countercultural figures, movements and pieces of art that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, e.g. New Hollywood and independent films (such as knowing the oeuvres of Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich and John Cassavetes), the Manchester and London punk and post-punk scene (listening to and appreciating the Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd, The Fall, Joy Division, etc) and other such things. Knowing critical modernist and abstract-expressionist artists and designers such as people involved in the Bauhaus movement and de Stijl, as well as Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and so on is also a big part of it.
In general, the art that we venerate and consider intellectual says a lot about the aspirations, beliefs and general zeitgeist of our society, and it certainly applies here. Any such aristocratic Victorian ideals that persisted in the early half of the twentieth century were all but swept away by the counterculture of the post-war period, and by the time the third millennium began it had largely been replaced with an... entirely different set of ideals and hierarchies. All of the stuff that is considered intellectual today was explicitly about "breaking from tradition", breaking from conventional notions of beauty, prioritising the individual artist and their subjectivity over the consumer, accepting the strange and absurd and even the outright ugly. That goes along with a zeitgeist that's typified by a blank-slatist idea of the human mind wherein all aesthetics, beliefs and social structures are fully enculturated, it embraces absurdism and subjectivity to the point that it claims that truth is unattainable and morality is merely a construct (used primarily as a rhetorical device to undermine and expose the previous system as fake, all while the ideology contradictorily makes its own sweeping claims about truth and morality and imposes its own social stratifications that are elevated to the level of dogma), and it's so beholden to its roots and needs something to be in opposition to so badly that it's unable to stop LARPing as subversive and countercultural even after it has ossified into every institution and become the hegemony. I find it very funny that progressive media and art now finds itself in the strange position of having become an institution with its own stringent and limiting criteria for deemed excellence.
I think there is a nascent counter-counterculture forming at the moment in certain very online dissident right and dirtbag left spaces with their own distinct mannerisms and aesthetics, but it's going to be a good long while before they take the world by storm in the same way that the 1960s and 1970s saw.
I would add a more specific question for whether there are parts of town that are particularly interesting on the street level, in the sense of having local colour rather than being all globalised slop. (I'm quite open to shantytowns and the like too.)
That does exist in places (I look for these kinds of neighbourhoods as well; I truly hate the International Style). You'll find a lot of lovely colourful Straits-style shophouses in and around Chinatown, which also happens to house the two traditional Hokkien temples I spoke about earlier. In addition, Little India should provide you much of that local vernacular style, there are many shophouses there that primarily cater to the Indian diaspora. Koon Seng Road also features a bunch of Peranakan dwellings that have been painted very colourfully, though there isn't that much else to do in the area.
Also, anything touching on the military history of the place? The British colonial era, prisons/bunkers/batteries that changed hands during WWII or were otherwise connected to it being overrun, etc.?
There are a good number of colonial-era WW2 forts and bunkers: the most prominent are Fort Siloso, Labrador ATMB Battery, and the Battlebox on Fort Canning Hill (the Battlebox, in particular, is where the decision to surrender Singapore to the Japanese was made). Fort Canning also has some earlier fortifications going back to the 1800s, though only the gate and two cannons remain of this early fort. There's also the Changi Chapel and Museum, which features exhibits on a strange part of WW2 history: it was a place where Allied POWs were interned during the Japanese occupation of Malaya, and during this period prisoners converted buildings into churches and built makeshift altars out of scrap.
By the way don't forget to try the Singapore chilli crab. Criminal thing to miss out on, in my opinion.
A one- or two-day excursion to Malaysia is probably conceivable; how is the transport situation to go to Malacca or beyond? Are there good trains, or is it sensible to rent a car and drive?
There's no direct train from Singapore to Malacca, and it's a three-hour drive between the two cities if you're using a rental. I believe there are also buses directly connecting the two cities, that's a four hour trip.
In other words, it's doable if you're willing to spend a bit of time on the road. Ideally I would spend two full days just to soak in the vibe, though I'm not sure how realistic that is for you depending on your schedule. Malacca is small and sleepy but very charming, it has all the local feel you would want from a Southeast Asian city (it's so colourful and vibrant it looks like a Wes Anderson film sometimes), and has the historical credentials to boot, having been founded around 1400 as the capital of a sultanate. Lots of pretty little temples, heritage houses, churches, mosques and fortresses. It also has the most consistently amazing food I've tasted in the whole country, and I do not say this lightly; I grew up in Malaysia and am very particular about my Malaysian food.
If you end up deciding that you want to do Malacca just let me know. I can offer up some very detailed recommendations.
EDIT: Note that NUS Baba House seems to be closed for renovations, for something similar to that there's also the Singapore Peranakan Mansion Museum.
I really want to attack this reasoning because it's at the core of your argument and I'm not certain it makes much sense. I agree that there is, as your article states, an art of "making the best use of the limited area of freedom of action left us by the deterrent effect of the existence of nuclear weapons". But the idea that deterrence can only be achieved by amassing as large an arsenal as possible is not sound, and was the very second-strike capacity which I think I addressed in my previous comments. The following Cold War argument in the article is as such: "Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them."
This logic only holds assuming perfect information is present, but it rarely is. In practice, it is virtually impossible to detect and destroy literally every silo and submarine in a fairly large geographical area, and second-strikes are pretty much all but guaranteed for a country with any sizeable nuclear arsenal. Once your opponent is able to diversify their holdings via the nuclear triad in any significant capacity it would not be very easy to actually eliminate your opponent's second strike capability wholesale. After your nuclear arsenal grows to a certain level, you do not in practice have to engage in this extremely costly contest in which a greater and greater proportion of public funding goes towards maintaining a nuclear arsenal of gradually increasing size.
It's partially for this very reason that towards the end of the 1960s, there were several reforms to the planning process that came with a realisation that a bloated stockpile was not necessarily an effective deterrent (and came with steep fiscal costs) that led to the decline in such massive additions, and eventual disarmament. Hell, even McNamara himself noted the diminishing returns inherent in keeping a huge stockpile of reserves. "The point to be noted from this table is that 400 one megaton warheads delivered on Soviet cities, so as to maximize fatalities, would destroy 40 percent of the urban population and nearly 30 percent of the population of the entire nation... If the number of delivered warheads were doubled, to 800, the proportion of the total population destroyed would be increased by only about ten percentage points, and the industrial capacity destroyed by only three percentage points... This is so because we would have to bring under attack smaller and smaller cities, each requiring one delivered warhead. In fact, when we go beyond about 850 delivered warheads, we are attacking cities of less than 20,000 population."
McNamara argued that deterrence was achieved when 25% of the Soviet population could be threatened by their nuclear arsenal. According to that threshold, this study estimates that 51 warheads would deter Russia, 368 would deter China, 300 would deter all of the NATO member countries, 124 the US, and 11 Canada. Meanwhile, at the height of the Cold War the US held like 12,000 warheads. It was excessive and inefficient by any reasonable standard.
Except: "This article tests a core argument of the nuclear competition school regarding the effect of the nuclear balance on the initiation of nuclear crises. With original data on strategic nuclear balance, my statistical analysis shows that having a superior nuclear arsenal than another nuclear-armed opponent does not lead to a reduced likelihood of nuclear crisis initiated by the opponent. These core findings hold after conducting a series of robustness tests with various measures of the balance of nuclear forces."
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