Nuclear War

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The deputy head of a Chinese military academy told an audience in Shenzhen last month that tensions in the South China Sea could be resolved by sinking a pair of U.S. aircraft carriers, reports said.

"What the United States fears the most is taking casualties," said Rear Admiral Lou Yuan, deputy head of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, news.com.au reported. He said sinking one carrier would kill 5,000 and sinking two would double that number.

there were "five cornerstones of the United States" open to exploitation: their military, their money, their talent, their voting system -- and their fear of adversaries

Source: Sinking US aircraft carriers will resolve tension in South China Sea, says Chinese admiral

I wonder if they considered the possibility of an all out nuclear war in retaliation?

The Chinese official apparently never heard of ….

The Battleship U.S.S. Maine (blew up by accident in Havana Harbor from a boiler malfunction in 1898, but it got blamed on Spain, and was exploited by the U.S. as an excuse to start the Spanish American War).

The HMS Lusitania: A British passenger liner torpedoed by a German sub in 1916. Eleven hundred civilians drowned, included a couple hundred Americans. The incident help flip American public opinion out of neutrality, and led to the US entering the First World War on the side of Britain against Germany.

A little thing called "Pearl Harbor". A Japanese carrier task force annihilated the American Pacific fleet at its home base.

The Tonkin Gulf Incident: A mixture of both real, and imaginary, attacks on two American destroyers by North Vietnamese PT boats off of the coast of North Vietnam. The incident was exploited by LBJ to escalate the US involvement in Vietnam and enlarge the mess into a major land war.

Every major American war of the Twentieth Century, except the Korean War, was triggered by someone attacking boats, or by an American POTUS pretending that someone attacked boats!

So I think that his reasoning is a little bit ass-backward.

...And sinking ships is a good way to "resolve" tensions since when?

The current government in Beijing I have no positive regard for. The only national government with more hubris is the American government, currently headed by a gentleman who is insecure about his manhood. I would hope this Chinese minister knows that naval conflict never ends well, and we're just one bad military conflict away from the extinction of the human race. I'd like to die of natural causes, not in a nuclear holocaust.

Here's my solution for world peace: split the world's largest countries apart- that includes the US, China, India, Brazil, Russia and maybe even the UK.

China perceived the lack of strategic focus of the George W. Bush administration and the passive “lead from behind” foreign policy of the Obama administration as American decay and decline. In reality, the foundational aspects of the American economy remain surprisingly strong and the American fighting spirit is not dead -- merely sleeping. Those who would believe that the sinking of two aircraft carriers would trigger an impulse toward retreat would do well to make themselves aware of the United States’ history and the impact events such as the sinking of the Lusitania, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the collapse of the World Trade Center had on the national psyche. What some have labeled the Jacksonian impulse could be described as a tendency toward great power rage. To be sure, it burns itself out. After all, the U.S. is considering leaving Afghanistan, 17 years later.

But make no mistake: Any attack upon a single U.S. aircraft carrier by long-range aircraft, cruise missiles or ballistic missiles would surely generate a response against the bases from which those weapons were launched, the sensors associated with them and the command-and-control nodes that directed them, and then the United States would turn its attention on the Chinese naval and merchant fleet.

Before China knew what was happening, it would be cut off from the overseas sources of energy and raw materials that fuel its import/export economy. Within weeks it would be without fuel and its factories would be shuttered. The American economy, established in a nation that has most resources domestically available, would be able to ride out the storm, even if China attempted to climb the escalation ladder and attack targets in North America.

Source: China should think twice before threatening to attack Americans

This is preposterous, China needs Americans on Chinese soil to run their economy, no different from America's need for Chinese nationals throughout our own economy. In many ways we've been codependent enough to act as one country.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

Probably because the U.S. threatened the entire world any number of ways. From a realists' standpoint, nuclear powered vessels the size of small towns full of weapons probably don't exist to help anybody.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

It would "resolve tension" by leading to the destruction of the People's Republic of China.

Still on the subject of nuclear war. I was reading an article this morning where a radical environmentalist was advocating nuclear war as a means of controlling global warming.

Does he even have any idea what the consequences of nuclear war is? A full out nuclear war will cause the destruction of hundreds of millions of lives, maybe even billions of lives. Many people will not die but experience a very slow agonizing death over the next decade or two when their lives are cut off prematurely by starvation, disease, the effects of radiation poisoning. The destruction of nations and societies can have very bad consequences. Look at all the lives lost, homes destroyed, businesses destroyed, the hunger, starvation and sheer inhumanity observed during the WWII. It is not something to be wished for.

Sometimes I think that the elites believe they will survive such a conflict unaffected. But a full out nuclear war will affect the entire world, everyone.

__________________________________________________

Samuel Miller-McDonald, who writes at The Trouble today that perhaps the only hope for avoiding catastrophic global warming is for a nuclear war to reduce human population and consumption. You need to read the whole thing to appreciate its full dementia, but here is the climax of the argument:

One wrench that could slow climate disruption may be a large-scale conflict that halts the global economy, destroys fossil fuel infrastructure, and throws particulates in the air. At this point, with insane people like Trump, Putin, Xi, May, and Macron leading the world’s biggest nuclear powers, large-scale conflagration between them would probably lead to a nuclear exchange.

A devastating fact of climate collapse is that there may be a silver lining to the mushroom cloud. First, it should be noted that a nuclear exchange does not inevitably result in apocalyptic loss of life. Nuclear winter—the idea that firestorms would make the earth uninhabitable—is based on shaky science.

Like the 20th century’s world wars, a nuclear exchange could serve as an economic leveler. It could provide justification for nationalizing energy industries with the interest of shuttering fossil fuel plants and transitioning to renewables and, uh, nuclear energy. It could shock us into reimagining a less suicidal civilization, one that dethrones the death-cult zealots who are currently in power. And it may toss particulates into the atmosphere sufficient to block out some of the solar heat helping to drive global warming.

What we do know is that humans can survive and recover from war, probably even a nuclear one. Humans cannot recover from runaway climate change. Nuclear war is not an inevitable extinction event; six degrees of warming is...

Now, I’m so old I remember when the most socially conscious people regarded the prospect of nuclear war with dread rather than hope. And perhaps we should be grateful for Mr. Miller-McDonald in making explicit what I put in boldface above—that the climatistas want to “shut down the global economy.” This is another good sign of how climate change has completely deranged some people.

Source: NUCLEAR WAR WILL SAVE US!

Actually China doesn't hafta sink our carriers.

All they have to do is (a)keep on teaching their naval cadets how to use a sextant. And (B) send buckets of gravel up into low earth orbit on rockets to be emptied into space to take out all of the World's GPS satellites.

Annapolis stopped stopped teaching our cadets the old fashion way of navigating back in the 90's. So if the Chinese did the above we wouldn't even be able to get our carriers out of the harbor in San Diego, while the Chinese navy would be free to rule the seas.