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

Not if it doesn't carry a nuclear warhead.

Russia's "almost unstoppable" anti-ship missiles are nothing new. The Navy has been preparing to counter them since at least the 1970s (if not even earlier).

 

You are assuming that snowflake generation now coming of age and entering positions of political power would pursue the course of action you outline. I'm not so sure.

 

Should have left Vietnam off the list. We lost 58,000 lives and god knows how many wounded and harmed- and lost. We didn't want to fight at the level needed to win; to create enough enemy casualties, so our government just made numbers up to tell the people we were winning. We gave that war away, and sacrificed all those men when we shouldn't have been there in the first place. We were the one who got out to save our butts, not the North Koreans.

Overall, I think previous comments are probably right; I'm afraid the newer generations lack the backbone to do the job if it became necessary again.

 

No, Vietnam absolutely belongs on that list. The VPA and VC believed that the US quit after Tet. Did we quit Vietnam in 1968?

 

He doesn't know what he's talking about and he's just blustering.

Short of the use of a nuclear weapon, there is no way to sink a US aircraft carrier. US carriers are specifically designed not to sink. They can withstand dozens of torpedo hits and still float. There's a recent NOVA documentary about the sinking of a WW II-era aircraft carrier to create an artificial reef. You should have seen the planning, time and effort expended to sink that carrier, and that was a WW II-era carrier.

If the admiral had half a brain, he'd know it's merely sufficient to damage the flight deck to put a carrier out of operation.

Damaging the flight would likely result in significant loss of life, and also prevent the carrier from launch and recovery operations.

That would also impair the capabilities of any other carrier operating in tandem, because while carriers can handle more aircraft than assigned, it impedes flight deck operations like refueling, rearming, launch and recovery.

 

What makes you so sure the Chinese wouldn't be the first to use a tactical nukes in this scenario?

 

They might. But the US military would retaliate with nuclear weapons if they did.

 

Thanks to bill clinton and republican free trade quislings in congress china is a growing threat to America

Curses on them

 

Wacko tree-hugging and desert lizard-kissing environmentalists would still be fighting against construction of the Hoover Dam today

 

The best thing to do is embargo all chinese imports

 

so Trump is President 2 years and now China thinks we have gone soft... time for a new president

Trump is a joke and the world is laughing at us

 

This snowflake in chief would probably sell us to the highest bidder

Narcissists like Trump only care about themselves

 

Sadly I think if and when there is a war between major powers tactical nukes will be part of it. The incentive to neutralize our carrier fleet would be too strong to resist.

 

Trump isn't the issue here, only congress can declare war and the world sees the snowflake generation taking control of congress which in turn emboldens them and makes the world a more dangerous place.

 

Our military is prepared to win a nuclear war with China if one were to occur.

 

God forbid!

 

True.

But if it happens, they are prepared to win it.

 

Eisenhower's military policy was a small military backed up by nukes and the willingness to use them. That was proven ineffective with the French defeat in the battle of Dien Bien Phu when we didn't have the military resources to help them and our nukes were useless. I don't want to see us slip back into that mindset.

 

Don't get me started on Ike. The man was a menace to American security.

Our current policy is a large conventional military backed up by nukes. If China starts a conventional war we can win it. If China starts a nuclear war we can win it.

Ideally this will deter war altogether.

 

There's no evidence they have any.

China has a very limited nuclear stock-pile, well under 300 warheads.

But, the number of operational deployed warheads is less than 200.

Nearly all of the deployed warheads are single megaton warheads for use with silo and road-based ICBMs, SLBMs, and gravity bombs.

It's only recently that China has been able to deploy a MIRV system. They have an ICBM and SLBM capable of delivering multiple independently-targeted re-entry vehicles.

To complete their triad, China does have a limited number of megaton range gravity bombs.

Nuclear weapons have never been a priority for China. What they have is for deterrence purposes.

China also has an intermediate range missile that most likely carries a 400-450 kt warhead.

Russia still has about 3,000 neutron warheads. The theoretical limit on a neutron warhead is 20 kt, but the actual design limitations are 12 kt to 15 kt. Most of Russia's neutron warheads are 1 kt artillery fire atomic projectiles and 10 kt short range missile warheads, but they do have several hundred 1 kt and 10 kt gravity bombs designed to be delivered by the Su-series attack aircraft.

China has neither the technology nor the experience to build neutron warheads.

Clinton gave China the "football" and missile and satellite technology to China, but after more than 20 years, China hasn't done anything with it.

Initially, missiles were very inaccurate. If you're going to miss the target by 4 miles, then, yeah, you need a 1 megaton to 9 megaton warhead. If you're going to miss the target by 10 meters to 100 meters, you only 400 kt to 750 kt to do the job.

Clinton's logic was that if China had more accurate missiles, they wouldn't need large warheads and they would reduce the size, but, again, China hasn't done anything with it.

Russia and the US needed tactical warheads, because of the threat of massed armor and mechanized formations. Although NATO and the Warsaw Pact claimed to be defensive, they both had offensive plans.

No one is going to attack China with massed armor and mechanized infantry vehicles, and China isn't going to be attacking any countries that do.

China is surrounded on two sides by water, one side by virtually impassable mountains, and even their only weak area, their northern border with Russia, is mountainous and hilly, and so not conducive to armor and mechanized operations.

If you don't need them, then why waste the time, money and limited resources to build them?

Russia, Iran and the US are sitting on piles of uranium ore, but not China. China has to import it, and it's not exactly cheap. Uranium is useless for nuclear weapons, unless you process it into Plutonium, and that's expensive and time-consuming, and if you don't do it right, then you've wasted your time. And then there's the time-consuming expense of separating Plutonium.

 

History repeats itself, I recall reading that was the same excuse the Japanese used in attacking Pearl Harbor.

 

You can thank Bill Clinton for giving them the horizon sensor technology that is needed on multiple warhead missiles.

 

Can't imagine why you are so sure what china does or doesn't have in it's nuclear arsenal. You have strong opinions based on speculation and little else from what I can tell.

 

What the hell does that even mean? are you saying that the president can not order a retaliatory strike without asking congress for a declaration of war? That Issue was settled 50 years ago and even a left wing nut job would not allow 10,000 of our sailors to be killed without retaliation. I can see some snow flakes trying appeasement leading up to such an event, but once an event such as that takes place even a pacifist understands that it would be a political death blow to allow such an affront to go unpunished. The biggest isolationists in 1941 wanted war once Pearl Harbor occured.

 

You mean they could let them run out of ammunition in the field? In theory maybe, but not in any practical sense.