problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
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?
Notably, Kennedy and McNamara were in power during the 1960s, a time of considerable fear and backlash against nuclear weapons. As such, they were highly motivated to find reasons to decrease the nuclear arsenal
I do not believe the assessment that McNamara said such things simply in order to justify decreasing the nuclear arsenal is at all justified. That reasoning is entirely ad hoc; you've basically swapped it out for your own ideas about the dynamics of nuclear warfare and geopolitics - and it's an idea that would have to contend with the fact that McNamara advocated for the development of MIRVs at the time and presided over an era where the US nuclear stockpile grew further in total.
That second paper you linked seems to be based on the number of "crises" that occur, and draws heavily on the example of Pakistan and India with Pakistan being the weaker power yet instigating crises. I'm not sure I agree we can generalize from that- Pakistan is just an aggressive, unhinged country.
I'm officially confused. Please ctrl+f this entire full text of the paper and search for the keywords "india", "pakistan". They appear only in the title of a single citation within the reference list. I'm not sure what your definition of "draws heavily" is, but I don't consider that to be "drawing heavily" on the example of India and Pakistan.
In the cold war, nukes were tough to aim and essentially non-interceptable (as well as a strong chance that they might not fire at all). That led to a focus on aiming for cities, and looking for deterrance. But again, technology has changed. Most nukes would not target cities any more, but military targets and especially known missile silos or airfields. So the number of civilian losses would be much lower, and the number of second-strike weapons fired also much lower. The US could potentially decimate China's nuclear arsenal with a surprise first-strike, then shoot down most of the remaining ones fired via interceptors, and the few that get through probably hitting isolated military targets rather than major cities. That's not something I want to see but, if I was China's military, it would have me terrified. Even the vague threat of such a scenario should be enough to make them take notice. Note that, unlike China, the US has never pledged no-first-use, it's always been assumed that it can use nukes whenever necessary.
Unless the US has developed a genie that grants wishes, there is no perfect intelligence which enables you to comprehensively target all missile locations a country has, there is no perfect stealth that enables these missiles to reach target before they notice and shoot back (China has many satellites and could easily notice hundreds of launched ICBMs), and there is no interceptor that allows for any kind of comprehensive defence - which is partially why I said that THAAD is not a convincing argument for "overwhelming military dominance", even assuming it is leaps and bounds superior to the Hongqi-19, an assumption I would not feel comfortable making. Nuclear warfare is in its nature inherently biased in favour of offence, and as it stands there is zero possibility of anywhere close to a comprehensive missile defence of the United States except in the minds of capeshit-prone Amerikaposters.
The fundamental problem is that you can produce missiles far faster and cheaper than interceptors. Interceptors are far more costly and difficult to make, scaling their production up is more difficult than just scaling up production of warheads, and unless their reliability is 100% you need way more interceptors than warheads. At the moment the US missile defense systems are designed and sized for limited attacks from "rogue states" like North Korea, not for the massive arsenals of peer competitors like Russia and China. That's before you get to the topic of MIRVs and other countermeasures, which basically guarantee your city is getting hit out of sheer volume, redundancy and some deception (note China has MIRVs).
You seem to think of producing more of these interceptors as a trivial task, but unfortunately it's not. Nuclear engagement is inherently asymmetric. Even if say the US builds 1000 more interceptor systems, an adversary realistically only needs a few hundred extra MIRVs to have a reasonable chance of multiple hitting their targets. And hilariously the interceptors are much more expensive and hard to make. They are cutting edge technology, while a hydrogen bomb is 50s tech and MIRVs are 70s. The second that there's an escalation of hostilities, China is going to be pumping missiles out en masse. It's already doing so in record time in response to the US' attempt to strengthen its defence system, and it's doing so with a much smaller amount of its budget allocated to defence compared to the US - and that's not even getting into how China's production pipelines are more efficient and scalable than the US. The second you build more interceptors, China will have built an order of magnitude more nukes.
I do not think the US could even potentially scrape past a missile exchange with a major nuclear power with minimal losses. Your hypothetical in practice looks more like a dozen warheads detonating over every major city in the US.
I would argue that it shows up quite frequently, and in fact was at the heart of Cold-war decision making. The acoup article on it was good. Having more nukes, more delivery systems, and also more defense systems, allows us to push the "red lines" forward to control borderline territories.
I really want to address this reasoning because it's at the core of your argument (I'll move on to other parts of your comment after this has been addressed, because it's by far the bit I take most issue with). 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 bomber 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 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 gradual 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 30,000 warheads. Cold War decision-making isn't something to emulate; it was excessive and inefficient by any reasonable standard, including their own.
It's not about evaluating the number of dead, it's about the chance of starting such a war. The USSR in contrast was able to invade prague and dominate eastern Europe, secure that the US would never risk war over some distant city. But now, the calculus is on the opposite foot- there's no way the PRC would risk nuclear war to protect Tehran, or even Pyongyang.
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."
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
11d 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 bomber 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 do have to second @pbmonster and ask why you're spending two weeks in Singapore. Perhaps I like to travel fast, but I spent far less time in Beijing, Seoul or Xi'an, all much older and more historically rich cities than Singapore. I honestly say three or four days maximum in Singapore, four if you're really dead from all the walking in the horrific tropical heat; you'll need to rest a lot in order not to pass out from heat exhaustion.
Anyway, I like history, so in my recommendations I'll focus on that alone. Firstly, there are some pretty nice Hokkien temples in the city centre. Thian Hock Keng Temple and Yueh Hai Ching Temple are two relatively old ones (hailing from 1800s) with colourful porcelain detailing and woodcarvings, personally I think you can't go wrong with Hokkien temples; most of them are quite beautifully decorated. Bunch of Indian temples downtown too: Sri Mariamman Temple, Sri Krishnan Temple, Sri Thendayuthapani Temple and so on are some old ones.
Secondly, there are also some historical houses I know of that you can mooch around. The House of Tan Yeok Nee is one of the only two remaining traditional large Chinese mansions left in Singapore, and it's built in Teochew style with a lot of tiling and decoration. And the Former House of Tan Teng Niah is a uniquely colourful Chinese heritage villa. The NUS Baba House on the other hand is a Peranakan/Straits Chinese villa; they're an ethnic group that has both Chinese and Malay descent and hybridises cultural influences from both groups. Worth seeing that when you're in the Straits, because that's an architectural trend you probably won't be able to find anywhere else.
Finally, if you really want a very weird and hyperspecific attraction, the Har Paw Villa is a strange bit of history. It was built by two Burmese-Chinese brothers who developed the analgesic heat rub known as "Tiger Balm" (if you're Chinese, you have definitely had this applied if you have had joint pain or even when you got sick as a kid). They built gigantic theme parks in Singapore, Hong Kong and Fujian showcasing dioramas of Chinese folklore and religion (the one in Singapore features over a thousand of them), which became a popular recreational destination in Singapore. In its heyday during the 1950s and 60s, the park hosted about 1 million visitors yearly, though visitor numbers have significantly decreased now.
Anyway, I'd also recommend making trips to Malaysia, and would point to Malacca and Georgetown as particularly interesting and historical places. I was there just this January, so if you want more info on them I'm happy to provide it.
I took them to a few places that were unique enough but also interesting (spending the night at Koyasan temple, for example) that many tourists still don't know about.
If it's not too much to ask, I would actually be interested to hear what Japan recommendations you have for someone who is basically allergic to large crowds. In spite of my reservations about the tourism I'm not averse to the idea of a future trip to some lesser known destinations in the country, though I'd want to stay away from Kyoto, Fujikawaguchiko, Osaka and Tokyo entirely.
As such I've been scoping out the area for interesting places, and have been considering Koyasan, Nikko, Sado Island, Matsue/Izumo, Iya Valley and Hiraizumi; Miyajima looks nice too, but Itsukushima-jinja seems crowded on the best of days. It's a bit of a shame because Kyoto/Nara is so obviously the cultural centre of Japan with by far the highest concentration of history, and attractions seem to be rather far apart outside of there with a couple exceptions, but I can't justify travelling there considering the sheer amount of tourism the city receives. It's far beyond the actual capacity that it can realistically accommodate.
problem_redditor
20d ago
This is really good! Surprised this has been blowing up for two weeks and I missed it; this is the kind of thing that I could see myself having on regular rotation for a while.
Hainan's beaches don't really compare with Southeast Asian beaches though, its geography isn't very dramatic, and it also has a lack of heavyweight historical sights that could compare with an Angkor Wat or Borobudur Temple, being largely on the fringes of the Chinese state ever since it was incorporated into the empire. It was literally used as a strategic naval outpost and a prison island for exiled officials for much of Chinese history.
Most of the best Chinese historical sights are located deep in the north of the country, in provinces like Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu and so on, and while they are really spectacular to the point that I would say they're the best I've seen, the climate up there is indeed aggressively unforgiving. I visited in winter and it was cold, dusty and desolate to the point it felt practically Siberic; at one city I was in the temperature dropped below -18 degrees Celsius. I'm willing to endure these climates if it means I get to see all the historical sights by myself - even Chinese domestic tourists fuck off when everything is that cold - but your average tourist probably won't want to travel in these conditions, and probably would prefer to travel someplace with more English uptake, less spitting on the ground, international-standard tourist amenities, a better climate, and higher cultural status/clout within their social milieu.
I would say they're missing out on absolute peak, but people travel for significantly different reasons than I do I guess.
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.
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