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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   434 thread views

Transnational Thursday for April 2, 2026

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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there are several areas (such as submarines and orbital launch capability) where the US is ahead of China (both in quality and in scale

Submarines is an interesting one. The US is currently producing what, 1.3 Virginias/year, and they're trying (and currently failing) to get that up to 2.5 to support their own needs plus AUKUS? But then there's also the new Boomer class entering production.

I believe China is producing more subs/year, but that might also include diesels. Which are useful for them to protect their own backyard, but are not the sort of thing that would be in any way useful for America to make.

Quality-wise, though, I believe you're dead-on, that nobody can currently match US nuclear submarines, although China is narrowing the gap.

I went and eyeballed it a while back, and the Chinese are definitely producing more annually, but theirs are smaller. The new Virginias being constructed now are over 10,000 tons displacement, whereas the conventional 039, of which they've build a bit more than 1/year for 20 years, is about 3,600 tons, and even the nuclear 093 (built at less than half the rate) is only twice that, whereas the historical production rate of Virginias is about 1.5 since 2008, although until Block V they were only 7,900 tons.

Even the 095 that your article flags is only going to be about the same size as a Block V.

I don't think that displacement is everything with ships (for instance it can be better to have three conventional submarines instead of one nuclear submarine, because you could rotate the diesels for a persistent presence and not the nuclear submarine!) and certainly being bigger doesn't give you more HP, or something. But it does give you more payload, which is pretty relevant, particularly when you're slinging payloads of cruise missiles and going through lots of torpedoes. In a major war, that means that your ships can stay on station longer and do more damage.

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