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Notes -
The PRC's doing another round of drills around Taiwan.
There's a real possibility that this one is the ruse of war that the others were meant to make believable; all the stars have basically aligned. The charm offensive failed in 2019-20 with the Darth Vader stunt on Hong Kong, there's a shitshow of a US election campaign in progress (two assassination attempts plus a disqualification attempt), the US President is significantly demented, William Lai got elected Taiwanese President earlier this year, and October's a good month in terms of weather conditions for amphibious assault, plus Beijing's adversaries are re-arming and Biden will be gone before April so that puts some degree of time pressure on them.
I wouldn't panic just yet; even if this is the big one (and it may not be), my guess is that they won't open WWIII with a nuclear first strike on CONUS/Europe/Australia (pre-emptive ASAT use to wipe out US satellites - and probably destroy all other low-earth-orbit satellites as collateral damage - is a possibility, though, so you may lose any communications dependent on those). But anything that you might have trouble doing later - beating the rush to buy bottled water/non-perishable food/aluminium foil/iodide tablets or whatever (not all of those are applicable to all of us), or maybe starting construction of a fallout shelter - this is your advance warning. As far as Guam/Japan/South Korea go, there may be pre-emptive missile attacks on US bases, but I still wouldn't expect cities nuked as part of the opening move so my advice is mostly the same. But if you're in Taiwan itself, I'd suggest getting out; if this goes hot there'll likely be a blockade attempt by the PLAN, so you may not be able to get out later.
To be clear, I'm more worried now than I've been since at least 2017 (the Trump-Kim yelling match) - and I was in Melbourne then, and thus personally at risk. I was mildly nervous back in April of this year, but you'll note that I didn't make a post like this then.
Remember that your life is worth a lot more than a few hundred bucks; it is rational to take action even if you rate the chance of nuclear war as "small but significant". Remember also that it is good to survive; while QoL might suck in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war, we'll recover, and if you have any ideological goals you will in almost all cases help them more if you're still around to advocate and act for them (note that if you're in the military or can otherwise help win the war, that's a worthy cause; I'm not advising desertion). That said, good luck to us all and I hope I'm worried over nothing.
m9m out.
EDIT: The drills seem to have completed; we seem to be safe for now.
It's extremely unlikely that there will be a full blown war over Taiwan at all, in my opinion. The Chinese have no need to risk it all to secure territorial integrity, and as other commenters have suggested, there's no rush for China either. Economic warfare (cessation of PRC-ROC trade rather than outright blockade) is more likely. AFAICT the mainline scenario is where the US continues to onshore the useful productive capacity of Taiwan (chip fab), with possible human capital absorption as well. Eventually, the value of Taiwan for the US will decrease to the point where it isn't worth going to war, and a Hong Kong style handover will begin. This would disrupt the island chain strategy of course, but the reality is that as the Taiwanese economy becomes increasingly reliant on the PRC, and the value of it to the US decreases, there's only one likely direction of travel. Plenty of unknowns but I'd put a 40% likelihood on this kind of scenario playing out in the next 5-10 years or so, much more likely than a hot war involving the 2 superpowers.
Agree, China doesn’t want all the most valuable chip production to be in Taiwan. If they could press a button tomorrow and turn Taiwan into worthless farmland inhabited by a few peasants they’d do it in a heartbeat. They are clearly willing to wait for production to slowly move elsewhere (both to the US and China proper) and then to move when the island is no longer strategically as valuable to the West.
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