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Strategic nuclear balance between US and China has apparently changed, and this has been publicly acknowledged by elected US representatives.
Apart from it making a US led escalation of a Taiwan war somewhat less likely, I'm not sure what this means. A ploy to get more money for defense ?
It's a big deal as scholars on twitter whom I follow were reduced from their usual verbosity to posting just .. "what the hell".
I've been seeing rumors from nuclear experts about a Chinese nuclear build-up, but now US house & senate claim it's real.
Would welcome some discussion of this, as I'm sure this is going to have real world implications.
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both sides have enough nukes to annihilate the world multiple times over anyways - is this about first strike capability?
They probably want the ability to hit targets with higher confidence. Shooting multiple missiles is an easy way to do that.
Still, I wonder why China ramped up nukes more recently, decades after the soviets and USA have abandoned the same strategy. Also, why is it such a secret? Of course you'd want to keep the details secret, but wouldn't you at least want your enemies to know you have a large nuclear arsenal?
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No, they don't. You need orders and orders of magnitude stronger weapons to destroy the world.
That's bullshit fearmongering courtesy of .. probably Soviet disinfo aimed at disarmament.
US with their nukes could crash the world economy but they'd be unable to kill more than say, 30% of world population even if they tried their hardest with proper targetting. (and every nuke was deployed, not just the ones presently mounted in delivery systems)
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This may not be the case, Chinese nuclear arsenal is shrouded in mystery and nobody knows how many they have. The estimates range from just couple dozens to high hundreds. Another factor here is that Chinese army is famously corrupt and inept. You have a lot of nepotism - like Mao's grandson who is clearly borderline mentally challenged holding position of Major General and being in charge of thousands of soldiers. Chinese general Guo Boxiong who was sentenced for corruption was charged with openly selling promotions inside army en masse. If somebody thinks that Russian Army is corrupt, Russians are playing child's game next to the status of PLA. So who knows how many of the nuclear weapons are actually functional. Nukes require very sophisticated and expensive maintenance and calibration. And these are exactly ideal targets of corruption as they are existing only on paper with low chance of them ever being used. Similar situation as when Russian suddenly realized that supposed 1.5 million uniforms in warehouses actually do not exist. It is similar situation as when within weeks of declared inspection of grain reserves in China many grain silos mysteriously caught on fire.
It's believed by military analysts Xi clamped down on that and mostly fixed it. And they also appear to now hold adversarial military exercises.
Xi did not clamp on anything. China runs on corruption - there is 100 million members of CCP who suck the blood out of Chinese people. Corruption is how things are done. The whole thing has analogy of Medvedev´s anti-corruption campaign in 2009, the only purpose for it was to eliminate political enemies like it was done with Khodorkovsky in 2003.
I am not saying that corrupt officials should not be arrested. But it would be as if gang leader turned political leader did a campaign to eliminate murderers, thieves and drug dealers. The only thing that would result is domination of his gang and corrupt and ineffective police force under his thumb.
I am reminded of the story of that Russian military minister(?) who did manage to legit reform Russia's military (allowing them to win in Georgia), only to be eventually sacked because, of course, he was rocking the boat too much for Putin's friends.
Which is indeed the ambiguity: has Xi, as the big cheese of China, managed to genuinely clean the rot out from the CCP and orient the PRC into a worthy competitor to the US in all matters political, economic, and military, or is this more like Saudi Arabia where "anti-corruption" efforts were just a fig-leaf for getting his political opponents out of the way? Even if the former is true, can he remain in power, or has he shaken things up too much and painted a target on his back? If the latter is true, should we even worry about the Thucydides Trap?
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Is that really true?
I've only ever heard this but I just find it hard to believe.
Like, whose nuking Italy and is the nuclear fallout really going to destroy Italy? Or the Pacific islands? Florida?
Will all the missiles actually hit? Won't most be intercepted?
I just don't buy it but I have zero reference point for this aside from the 1000 & 1 times over heard it said.
Literally destroyed, every square mile burning and uninhabitable? No. Not 99% human extinction, maybe not 90%.
Irreparable damage to any way of life more sophisticated than the 1700s, probably. Quite a large fraction of the world is next to either a military base or an industrial target.
There's also the problem that most of the cheap if dirty sources of energy and other resources are much scarcer than they were in the industrial period. Even with modern knowledge to bootstrap it would be harder to build back to the same level of technology.
And that the best places to live and build are...currently occupied and built upon, and thus high on the target list.
Airbursts (for maximum effect on surface targets) have very little residual radiation at the target site at least. A few days to a few weeks (how long before survivor populations in this sort of scenario would even venture towards bombed out target locations) should be fine. Ground bursting trades radius for the ability to hit hardened, buried targets (plus fallout) and wouldn't likely be used in most of those desirable locations. Not great for current occupants but survivors ought to be able to recolonize many of those nice places to live without that much trouble.
Unfortunately there's a lot of ground burst targets near some cities, like major railyards, ports, or the giant buried warehouse of ~2300 Trident missile warheads sitting right next to Seattle. Some of those places are going to glow for a long time.
Edit: maybe only a thousand or so now, unless the ones they're planning to scrap are still in storage?
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The key thing here to understand is half life and radioactivity.
The worse, more harmful some radiation product is, the faster it decays into something harmless.
Another key thing that dangers of radiation are massively overhyped. It's deadly, but not nearly as much as people believe due to popular media. (you can google 'radiation hormesis' and read about it)
Intercepting ballistic missiles is very unusual; it can be done but at the moment you can only hope to see a missile intercepted if you e.g. are on a US carrier, and there are not too many incoming warheads. Of course, in any real war on any protected target, they'd fire multiples.
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Wouldn’t Brazil and Australia come through a global nuclear war fairly intact, while being major food powers? Obviously USA, Russia, Canada, Ukraine, China don’t do too well in the event of a nuclear war, and Argentine and New Zealand agriculture is probably very reliant on imported inputs, but those two seem reasonably well suited to autarky and are major food exporters.
It does make me wonder about the minor nuclear calculus. Sure, France and the UK are probably bound to deploy as the US says. Does Pakistan decide to take a few shots? Does North Korea level Seoul while no one’s looking?
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I think it depends on your definition of annihilate the world multiple times over.
A widespread nuclear exchange would likely be incompatible with anything resembling modern civilization, especially due to how inter-networked the global economy is etc.
Would it be a case where every person perished individually as a result of a direct nuclear bombing, no.
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