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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35372 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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China is one of only two countries (the other being India) that have formally committed to a no-first-use policy. They also have enough ICBMs that they wouldn't need to worry about a missile defence system depriving them of their nuclear deterrent: even if it boasted high intercept rates, any near-term system would be unable to reliably intercept hundreds of simultaneous launches.

Doesn't Russia still have many more nuclear warheads + ICBMs than China, so a system that could negate the Russian nuclear deterrent would necessarily either automatically or in a matter of a few months of logisticking also negate the Chinese one?

I'm not sure that "formal commitments" of this type are worth anything in the context of planet-spanning life-or-death conflicts, and either way I'm not sure if this is relevant: the subtree of the game we're looking at would involve China doing something to assert its interests in its near abroad, followed by a conventional US intervention against it which fails to be decisive, followed by US threats or usage of nukes (just as the US used nukes when it didn't want to pay the price for conventionally deciding the Pacific Theatre of WWII). It matters all the way up the tree whether China then can successfully threaten or enact nuclear retaliation or not.

Absolutely - the deterrent effect of a missile shield isn't to protect against a general nuclear war in which Russia, China, or the US decides to hit the big red button. Given the constraints of MAD, I'd like to think that no state would rationally launch a first strike at scale. The point of the shield is to prevent countries engaging in low-level nuclear bullying, or attempts to use nuclear weapons to gain a limited battlefield advantage. Existing MAD doctrine doesn't really cover these kinds of contingency: the US isn't going to nuke Moscow just because Russia uses a battlefield nuke against a Ukrainian airbase.

I'm having trouble imagining a missile shield that would work against tactical nukes but not substantially reduce the effectivity of a launch-all volley. If your nukes are counted in the thousands, having to launch 10 instead of 1 against a battlefield target seems to be merely a cost issue if you know you need to saturate the defenses. Also, the metropole may be much easier to defend than any contested frontline (because of longer warning times, better supply lines and better radar coverage), so a system which intercepts 90% of incomings on the front might well intercept 99% near the capital, thus being a real threat to "full-volley" MAD too.

the US isn't going to nuke Moscow just because Russia uses a battlefield nuke against a Ukrainian airbase.

I would hope, but who knows. Maybe they would be tempted to at least nuke a Russian airbase, and then who knows where it goes from there. I really hope that the people who are calling the shots on our side are not themselves falling to the sentiments that they are tactically whipping up in the general population.

It's assumed by paranoid, untrustworthy people the missile shield is first intended to be just against 'North Korea' but after getting something working it's going to be scaled up to enable strategy where a first strike kills most of enemy weapons and then to withstand the limited retaliation.

Are you sure this would be true if missile defence technology advances to a degree capable of drastically muting the Russian nuclear arsenal? How could a system which couldn't deal with the hundreds of Chinese missiles be of any use against Russia's thousands? Surely the premise of this line of argument is a credible defence against Russia's arsenal - which dwarfs China's.

Also China would first blast fragmentation bombs in satellite orbit to disable/destroy 90% of all satellites before firing their nuclear salvo.

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