Quote:
Originally Posted by Kapitan
Not quite even if it went nuclear the consequences for China would be horrendous.
Any person who says just nuke them or they have nuclear weapons really cant hold any argument to counter the original point.
Is nuclear war likely ? nope not a chance even if a large war was to happen the rational of people would realize that your destroying your customer base because even after war victor or not you still need to trade to survive.
And currently China is America's best customer for buying its debt.
There are other ways.
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Sorry for the late reply (and the rather strong language that would follow), but this is wishful thinking. Even if both sides are fully rational (and even this is not nessesarily the case all the time) escalation of a large scale conventional war between two nuclear powers is not only posible but likely, which is why such a war has not happened since 1945.
Denying that the nuclear war could happen or overstating the damage by a limited exchange ("loss of all life on earth" etc) is dangerous as it is both delusional and undermines the bedrock of the modern security - deterence.
The economic interconnectivity/cost arguments are particularly bad, as even if discount both world wars we would see many modern conflicts, for example in the Middle East, where those considerations did not stop wars from happening.
For a practical hypotheoretical example I would suggest reading this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Commission-Re...=UTF8&qid=&sr=
(free from audible trial)
I would also suggest reading this long article on a broader and more detailed look into the US-PRC specific scenarios:
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi...2/isec_a_00320
p.s.
There are three questions you need to answer when considering this problem:
1) What kind of damage is unacceptable to the adversary?
2) Does the adversary view our capability to deal it as credible?
3) What do we do if deterence fails?
While the (1) did improve from 1950s-1960s in the sense that it is now believed that things under the Macnamara/Kurchatov criteria could work, with development and deployment of new arms, particularly by the US (2) looks bleaker, which pushes Russia and PRC to improve their forces.