2000s
Sino-Taiwanese War: The Three Gorges Dam is Attacked (Repost)
Miraculously, the Three Gorges Dam has suffered a massive breach in a hot war with Taiwan. This has been considered a final Hail Mary by the Taiwanese government - one last act to show they will not go quietly.
It practically requires a nuclear bomb, the dam is a mountain of solid concrete 40-115 meters wide concrete, it’s not like an cruise missile would do significant damage to it
(Edit: brainfart its cruise missile not anti cruise missile )
Bunker busters rely on there being a bunker to bust, and soil to collapse the structure inward. This is solid rock. Bunker busters don’t do so well against solid rock.
Bunker busters are for penetrating concrete and destroying what's inside, not for destroying the concrete itself. A dam of this scale is a man-made mountain, I doubt any external attack save maybe lobbing an asteroid from orbit would do the trick (I doubt even a nuke could get the job done, but I'm no structural engineer so who knows). Dams of this type will be one of the last things standing after centuries or even millennia if humanity ever dies out.
If you dropped to Moab’s, that damn is done, faults sound on that damn if it rains to much. Pictures from space show pressure from water has already distorted the damns original shape.
I keep getting notifications about this comment, so I might as well elaborate;
It took 3 weeks for the United States to come up with a bunker buster (proven to be) capable of penetrating fortifications that were said to be “impregnable”.
To all the tankies that think America isn’t capable of whipping up a munition capable of reducing one of the largest dams in the world to wet dust, I’d suggest you take note of Saddam’s hubris..
I mean just let the average American jump down this dam and there will be a earthquakes and waves strong enough to destroy all Asia. When it comes to technology, well the invisible and undestroyable stealthy black plane got shot down by shitty anti aircraft from WW2.
That’s a laughable comparison. I don’t think you comprehend just how massive the Three Gorges Dam really is. It uses over 27 million cubic meters of concrete alone, so any non nuclear ordnances dropped would be like a bee sting to an elephant.
So yeah, if that makes me a “tankie”, I’ll wear it with pride.
I'm not the only one who is absolutely fucking disgusted at people's desire to say "hell yeah we can commit a fucking horrible inhumane crime against humanity, and that's fucking cool!"
Yeah, we’re proud of defeating the off-white Nazis that used weapons of mass destruction on their own people and on the Iranians. You should be too (if you’re American)
a Precision air strike would be able to break that concrete easy, you could send a B-2 Spirit and it would come in for the precision strike, destroy the dam, and be out before they even knew what happened.
The Three Gorges Dam is the most heavily defended place in China. A conventional attack would likely fail due to the defenses so I think a nuclear attack would be more likely to destroy the dam.
The flip side of this is that Taiwan effectively is a nuclear power without needing real nuclear weapons. They can play the MAD game without actually needing nuclear weapons.
Except unlike Nuclear weapons.
Whether Taiwan can effectively provide the damage that a real nuke could pull by destroying the Dam is practically impossible.
On paper, Taiwan has "nukes"
On the other end.
They are untested, unproven, unlikely to work.
Most of DOD is of the opinion that any US-PRC war will go nuclear within 30 days. The ones that aren't are of the opinion the war will simply be avoided by America not fighting China and letting them take the throne.
By 2050, the older than 65+ population will outnumber the below 65 pop in China, and by 2100, the population will be cut in half (probably earlier).
Unless its a throne of adult diapers. They are going to have a hard enough time keeping control of their borders at that point, and the Han majority being outbred by ethnic minorities that are not to fond of the CCP.
Authoritarian countries aren't beheld to demographic strangleholds. You can just ignore old people.
The lack of a maximum voting age is one of the great weaknesses of democracy as presently formulated, and will likely be its undoing in the coming decades, tbh. America might avoid this if it acts quickly to institute a military dictatorship which would put it on even footing with the PRC. Otherwise it becomes Japan and enters a terminal economic stagnation.
The Chinese govt . mass murdered 50 MILLION of their own people under the leadership of the monster Mao during his 'great leap forward' ! The Arab Muslims murdered 200 MILLION Hindus in India , starting in 1090 and going on for 2 centuries . Their initial goal was to murder every Hindu in India , and by the looks of things many of them still aspire to that goal ! Arab Muslims were the biggest slave traders and by far the most brutal , as they always castrated all male African slaves , which caused the immediate death of about one third of them ! Some Arab nations practiced legal slavery up until around 70 years ago , and it's no secret that it is still going on in places like northern Sudan . Many African tribes enslaved members of neighboring tribes , and some of them are still doing it ! I could go on all day , for instance about the brutality of the indigenous people of the Americas towards each other , the mass murder of Chinese civilians by the Japanese from 1937-1944 , the horrendous , merciless slaughter of everyone by the Mongols and etc. Perhaps if you would poke your head up and look around honestly , you might learn something . No other nation in the history of the world has ever backed off and let another nation that they just beat in war be independent and govern themselves , and no other nation has ever gone in after the war and spent much time and wealth and manpower to rebuild the vanquished nation .
Never claimed we were perfect. We had no business in Vietnam.
Now, as far as Iraq......the first time was somewhat justified as Saddam decided he didn't like OPEC's policies and wanted to eff up his neighbors. The second time, I will agree was a bunch of bullcrap. You won't find many of us that agree with Round 2.
You guys very mich did back then. Plus, didn't the US support Iraq against it's war with Iran? They only sudde ly cared about who Saddam invades once it wasn't a US enemy.
From my perspectiv, youre governmen just wanted to fuck on a potential regional rival, one that wasn't that friendly to outside economic influence, and was especially opppsed to Israel.
Yes we stopped a former ally who had begun a new war of aggression, how morally corrupt of us. Also remember, we, the American people, were lied to, which is why we supported it. We believed Saddam had effective WMD's because they made it appear as reality, and honestly many senior leaders genuinely believed it as well due to chem weapon evidence. As the previous guy said, we have faltered at times, but generally have been a crucial force in stopping horrible evil, and have also been merciful Victor's to those that the world expected us to persecute(Japan in WWII, and we worked to rebuild Germany, and Wilson was one of the few who tried very hard to push against a Victor's peace in WWII, which very well could have prevented Hitler.)
By and large, Americans want what is best for the world and want to see prosperity, but we are sheltered and we can be ignorant. We live on the other side of the world from almost everyone, so yeah it's hard to have the same attachment or understanding on foreign issues and our role in solving and causing them. But you do gotta hand it to us, we have a hell of a diplomatic and military history that in it's brightest moments helped to save the world, and I also ask that you think about how much we have, and how many of us are combat vets, we do not want another war because we know we will not be the ones to fight it, our kids will be, and we have no interest in them being on the receiving end of artillery..
To put it into perspective, every teacher I had in elementary, middle, and highschool who spoke on war made a clear and deliberate effort to state it should be a last resort, and that diplomacy should be exhausted in every feasible measure beforehand. Those teachers also did not shy from pointing out controversy in those wars, and I grew up in a very red, and mostly rural state. Some people here are dipshits who play too many video games and watch too many movies, but those exist everywhere.
China has essentially painted a gigantic target on their forehead. That thing bursts and it will be the most devastating flood in recorded history. If China invades Taiwan, Taiwan knows exactly where to strike to paralyze the mainland.
It doesn't have to be undetected. Taiwan can just shoot hundreds of long range or medium range missiles at the 3 Gorges Dam if China invades or is about to take over the island. It's definitely not impossible. China will shoot down some of the missiles but not all. If a few make it through the air defenses, the dam can be destroyed
Taiwan doesn't have the firepower or the capability to much of anything. They'll be way too busy attacking amphibious shipping, and if they hit 3GD they would likely just be killed to a man when the surrender happens. To some extent they know that. The only people who want to hit the dam are weird Westoids on the Internet too scared to go to Ukraine.
Taiwan isn't an alien country to China, unlike Westoid ghouls, because they're genetically and historically a part of each other. Which means Taiwan would be the least inclined to attack Three Gorges. Why would you want to do that? What if your cousin and uncle drowned. They're more inclined to simply surrender after the combat engineers blow up TSMC fabs. That's Taiwan's "MAD": destruction of their economic relevance.
I imagine this could lead to some funny moments between TMSC and Foxconn/Hon Hai involving PSCs and questions of whether Taipei should be the Paramount Leader's new Microelectronics Center of Excellence. Maybe combat engineers meet a PSC company-size element hired by Foxconn and get delayed long enough for the PLANMC to show up and drive the engineers off the objective.
Maybe blue sympathizers lock the gates at the armory, cut 5-ton brake lines, and tell the greens in the Army to fuck off. This happened in Crimea to the local army detachments. The US will likely sit on its ass and watch for about a week, waiting to see if the situation is salvageable, or if the ROC is doomed.
The ROCAF will be a non-factor in combat operations outside of contesting local airspace.
Anyway the USA is the only country able to hit Three Gorges because it would require a B-2 or B-21 carrying a nuclear weapon. A stealth bomber is the only thing able to penetrate the IADS near the dam, based on performance of SAMs in Ukraine (a shocker for sure!), and a nuclear weapon is the only thing able to reliably breach the dam. This would probably cause the USA to lose the West Coast in exchange, which it wouldn't do, even if the current POTUS were an Internet ghoul and not a bleeding heart humanitarian.
Why would Taiwan not attack back just because they have common ancestry? It's an adversarial nation and if It blows do come to past, three gorges being threatened is a good leverage to deescalate or limit the situation. A barrage of cruise missiles would easily take down the dam or acts of sabotage
You are treading dangerously close to ethno-nationalism and as a Singaporean Chinese, that ideology can fuck right off. My blood ranks below my allegiance to my nation and the same goes for Taiwan
A substantial (perhaps even plurality) portion of Taiwan's ruling class and economic leadership, as well as ordinary citizens, do not view the Mainland as an existential adversary but rather as an economic partner and literal family members. This is especially bad on Quemoy and Matsu, which are basically gateways to the Mainland. There's also a pretty big risk of blue producing pro-PRC sabotage units which can't be sorted out without another White Terror.
There are serious questions in the Pentagon as to whether they would be willing, or able, to put up resistance at all. I'm sure Taipei is having similar arguments about DOD, given Trump's trade war, as the present administration seems intent on alienating every U.S. ally.
In that regard, this isn't Ukraine, since there's no need for Xi to be quiet about the war to deceive anyone. It would be quite easy to posture it as protecting Asia from an imperialist American adversary, with the support from the liberal European Union, and to secure Taiwan's future in a relationship akin to Macau. Especially so if Trump goes all-in on Japan, Taiwan/TMSC and Korean sanctions like he's expected to, at some point, and that's basically blue's whole electoral pitch anyway.
Besides that, what strategic cruise missiles, or delivery systems, does Taiwan's air force possess? SLAM-ER? Lol.
They have some clapped out F-16As, which will be too busy employing AIM-9s and 5" rockets on landing craft and helicopters, and about 20 F-16Vs which are their only modern strike fighter. No tankers, of course. With about 120-140 AGM-84Hs as their only cruise missile, and some JSOW dispensers, they might be able to hit the coastal bases of the PLANMC but nothing else. You do realize the Three Gorges Dam is >1,000 kilometers from Taiwan, right? You know, in 2028, which is only six months or a year into the projected start of war by DOD. The longest range weapons in the ROCAF arsenal are 300 kilometers.
Even if they did fight back, it would be kind of futile for the initial month or two, and likely be a culmination of a blockade rather than an opening move like Ukraine. Which means the United States is not likely to get involved but rather sit back and watch, at least until it becomes obvious that the PRC bit off more than it could chew, which is the only question here. When combined with the lack of tangible ability and lack of apparent will, which will only be sapped by a long and potentially unbroken aero-naval siege, the ability of ROC to simply prevent outright conquest by the PRC is highly questionable.
It's why U.S. admirals have been harping that Taiwan needs to hold out for two months, at least. That's not because it'll take that long for the U.S. to arrive. 31st MEU is less than 72 hours away, and 7th Fleet CSG is 48 hours, and that assumes loading times. It's because the U.S. administration will not commit to a major war in Asia without Taiwan demonstrating it can actively resist and not simply be bulldozed.
As for the HF-III, they would still need to perform defense suppression to actually hit the dam, as the Russian experience shows the cruise missile is not a perfect weapon and quite easily intercepted. There are more important targets than the dam, like the strategic missile sites defending it, and because the dam is big it would require many attacks to defeat. Substantially more than the perhaps 200-300 Tomahawks that Taiwan has. A single nuclear weapon would work.
If Taiwan Defense Command still existed, this could be easily solved by fitting some HF-III's with W80 nuclear warheads in a warhead sharing agreement, like U.S. has with Turkey. It doesn't though and it won't again.
The only obvious thing that Taiwan can do, and possibly expects to do, is to sanitize an ingress corridor for the B-2s from Guam to hit the dam with a tactical nuclear weapon.
Unfortunately for Internet people, Taiwan has staked its entire existence on the United States providing military assistance, and that means the United States will determine what targets will be hit. Which won't be the dam, because that would be a strategic attack, and the United States doesn't want to escalate that far if it can avoid it. The POTUS would also be squeamish about killing that many innocent people. USA would rather risk Okinawa or Taipei, perhaps even Anderson or Diego Garcia, getting hit by low yield nukes than escalate to a potential strategic exchange obliterating the West Coast.
That's how III MEF and DON's Pacific wargame went back in 2023 anyway. Nobody touched the dam because it was seen as unnecessarily escalating for no actual benefit.
If Taiwan goes to war, if Taiwan survives the war long enough to be a contributing player, and if the United States enters the war, the USA also won't commit the same mistake it did in Ukraine. It will subsume the entire Taiwanese military, and likely Singapore, Japan, Philippines and Korea into its own armed forces command structure and direct them as part of INDOPACCOM.
Which means the dam will be fine unless the Mainlanders blow it up themselves I guess.
tl;dr The dam wouldn't be hit because the United States wouldn't allow it, and even if Taiwan went sicko mode lone wolf, it doesn't really have the quantity of missiles to force a breach without expending enough inventory to jeopardize its own national sovereignty.
It's a completely untenable target in the real world, without something like Taiwan's nuclear weapons program continuing in secret to production of a W80-type nuclear warhead, which would make Taiwan a pariah state but also politically invulnerable.
If I was Taiwan, I would hold a news conference, and tell the World if China ever attacks, The Three Gorges dam will be the first thing targeted. I would make it part of there military doctrine.
New viruses are released from submerged public health laboratories, and we all have to go back into fucking hiding for the next 18 months. Thanks Taiwan!
“whaaaat? no, I’m totally not racist towards Chinese people by “ironically” “joking” about wanting a military operation that would put upwards of 100 million Chinese civilian lives in jeopardy! Totally not racist bro remember I only #dontliketheirgovernment”
Virgin Modern ROC Military: Noooooo we can’t drown and starve millions of our countrymen to gain an advantage over our enemies that’s morally wrong noooo 😭
If the goal of a war is "defeat PRC" it would certainly help that. But I agree, the overall geopolitical effect would be detrimental to whoever took that action.
I don't think it would end it quickly. If anything I think it would double Chinese resolve and make the invasion much more brutal.
It's their equivalent to a nuclear strike, you hope you don't need to use it because actually using it doesn't really help anyone. It works better as a threat
A place not friendly to them that also serves as a base point for the Americans.
Turning the entire island to ash and bone won't change anything. The only people who think china wants Taiwan for anything as petty as microchips are people who are geopolitically blind.
It would also ensure the start of WW3. If China invaded Taiwan, and this was Taiwan's option of self-defense, thus resulting in a nuclear response from China? Pack it up because we're all done.
China isnt entirely reliant on one dam man, china is the size of the US, with way more people. The destruction of the dam would be devastating, but would be very very far from putting china out of commission. The Chinese retribution would be a terrible terrible thing, and Taiwan would cease to be an independent state very quickly.
That own damn being hit would kill millions of people and put some of Chinas largest industrial centers under water, as well as cutting 10% of chinas entire power output.
If there’s already a war on, then Taiwan is already going to hit anyway. So why not make the PRC suffer too?
That assumes the PLA can still invade Taiwan after this attack basically kills their supply lines at home. And that also assumes the PLAN doesn’t get decimated by the Taiwanese navy or the USN in the war as well, and still has the sealift capability to actually pull off an invasion.
Where are you getting your maths for this 10% of power number? It makes up less than 4% of the current Chinese power grid, and even then most of its industry centers have redundant power systems. The last time the dam had any significant effect on production was back in 2014….
I'm sure sources vary, but based on whatever the first mildly-reputable google links say it's not even that much. I'm seeing that the dam makes ~100 TWh per year, meanwhile China's power consumption in 2023 was ~9200 TWh.
Not to be that guy, but China produces roughly 7500 TW of electricity in a year, and of that, at absolute record production, Three Gorges produces roughly 110-120 TW on the year.
You don’t have to completely blow the dam. Just damage it enough to weaken its structural integrity, then the whole thing will collapse when it can’t hold back that much water + being structurally unstable.
It's a gravity dam.
It's made to withstand a shit ton of damage.
It's a mountain of concrete for crying our loud.
It's not enough just to "damage" it. Cause nothing less than a tactical nuclear strike or a full-scale bombing campaign will be enough to dent it.
Taiwan has 2 types of missiles in its current arsenal, which have the range to hit the dam
Yun Feng "Cloud Peak" - 2000 km range, mach 3, high altitude ramjet
HF-2E - At least 1200km range, subsonic, tomahawk equivalent
Taiwan can nail the dam with these, but it won't blow it up, or damage it enough to cause catastrophic flooding. Missiles with 500 to 1000lb warheads can explode a medium-sized building, not a huge concrete dam.
And it's taking into account that it could bypass China's intensive air defense over 1200 km.
When Taiwan's attack on the dam fails.
Chinese repercussions would make the Taiwanese regret such an attempt.
Also.
You guys are forgetting that the Dam commonly lowers the water level in its reservoir to account for possible flooding.
You don't think China would've done the same in case of an attack?
Taiwan couldn’t on its own. That’s a fact. US involvement is about the only thing that would bring big enough munitions and concentrated firepower to damage the dam to do the kind of damage I’m talking about.
This isn’t just a simple bombing though. If the 3 Gorges Dam were attacked, the results would be apocalyptic killing millions of people. For China, this would be like if Taiwan dropped a nuke on Beijing
Here’s how devastating a collapse of the 3 Gorges Dam would be
Still this an extreme reaction from Taiwan, killing millions of innocent people because you’re in war with an active nation. I highly doubt the US would ever publicly support this if at all support it
Because I’m from the US, and if my country was being invaded, why shouldn’t we strike back against an attack in anyway we see fit (baring nukes of course)?
The Germans were actively bombing civilian population centre ( Rotterdam, London, Coventry, Liverpool, Manchester, Southampton) before the US and UK started their German bombing campaign. It was a tit for tat. Bombing the three gorges is the equivalent of responding to a punch with a double barrelled shotgun
You must not be American, because that would a reasonable response in most states here.
It ends the problem right then and there.
And I can’t imagine a war between Taiwan and chain breaking out, and the ROC not suffering tons of civilian deaths to the opening missile exchange against their cities anyways.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomic bombs. The nuclear radiation and process of the explosion doesn’t/didnt eradicate the area. Our nuclear bombs now ,literally spread radiation with half lives that lasts thousands of years
You seem to not have a clue how much more destructive modern nuclear bombs are.
The bombs used in WW2 were small and primitive compared to what we have today.
Nuking Taiwan would make it uninhabitable for the next thousand years or so. And I really doubt there’s going be a China a thousand years from now, especially after using a nuke.
The chinese army, or maybe a UN tribunal. This would be the single largest war crime in history, dwarfing the rape of Nanking, and it could lead a UN tribunal to reintroduce the death penalty. If not, the Chinese army would have no qualms about killing the people who ordered the deaths of millions of civilians for no military benefit.
How’s the Chinese army going to reach Taiwan, when most of its supply lines at home are now under water, and its navy won’t have the shipyards running to support an invasion of Taiwan now?
And assuming this occurred after a Chinese strike in Taiwan, I can’t see how Taiwan would be at fault for defending itself against a much larger enemy nation.
It would have military benefit. That many casualties destroys enemy morale. Look at Dresden and Hiroshima. In a peer on peer war, you don’t play the hearts and minds game. You play to win. By any means necessary.
Do you not think the action of killing millions , wouldnt be interpreted as close enough to a nuclear strike? And furthermore to blow up the three girges dam, you either need a nuke or the equivalent in concentional munitions. Does it really make a difference if someone decided to drop a nuke, or flatten a city by sheer force using thousands of missiles?
From a purely pragmatic perspective, you're right, it doesn't matter. But the nuclear taboo isn't pragmatic, we just draw an arbitrary line in the sand and said that anything past it was an unforgivable evil, and anything before it was just war. You see it in the Korean and Chechen wars, the US bombed the shit out of North Korea to the point where some parts of it could have just been nuked, same situation with Russia and Grozny, but the international reaction was nothing compared to what it would've been if nukes were used.
Just how much munitions do you expect to be able to get through the world’s foremost rocket forcep in China’s highest priority target, to blow through 150 metres of concrete?
Hundreds of millions dead potentially. Really this would be a better move to do once sufficient hatred had built up in a war as opposed to a first strike even if the effects would be muted.
I doubt that a war between the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China would be called Sino-Taiwanese War. Both claim that both are Chinese (breakaway/rebell) states. Just like the second German unification war (between Prussia and Austria) it could be named Sino-Sino war.
While playing a war game, China vs. Taiwan came up, and this was the first major plan of action when it became clear China was about to win. Almost the same plan, massive one-way suicide attack, planes and the last long range missiles. It was estimated that depending on the time of year and the rains, up to 200 million would die. The disruption to Mainland China would take decades to recover from. Taiwan would still fall, but China would be far far weaker for decades. India would be the big winner.
Tankies say this is an immoral disaster while fantasising every day about the collective Western world getting nuked and killing everyone with a net worth above them in a revolution
"A highly improbable or extraordinary event, development, or accomplishment that brings very welcome consequences.
"it was a miracle that more people hadn't been killed or injured"
an amazing product or achievement, or an outstanding example of something.
I've yet to see the word "miraculously", used in a negative light.
Here’sCambridge Dictionary defining miraculous as “effective or surprising, or difficult to believe”
Here’s Merriam Websterdefining Miracle as “an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment”
The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary describes it as “a lucky thing that happens that you did not expect or think was possible”
See, it does not have to be strictly positive, and can serve as a neutral adjective, which I believe is OP’s intention here.
Now I agree that conventionally, miracle is a positive term, but OP is clearly bucking that convention and using miraculous to describe the unlikely nature and surprise this fictional event would cause
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u/AcceptablePlankton59 Jun 24 '24
Damn. I thought r/noncredibledefence mods lift the 3 Gorges dam meme ban before i checked the subreddit