U.S.-China Nuclear War in 1998?

In most Cold War stuff I've looked at silo to silo was never part of counterforce, only the two or three control center bases were targets. So I think you are incorrect.
I'm pretty sure I'm not, I vaguely remember mentions of one control node for every 10 silos somewhere, but Asnys is more likely to know than I, see his response

The US ICBM force was designed to ride out a Soviet first strike, China's missiles at the time were inferior to the Soviets and they had much fewer

The US was also looking at ways of hardening the individual silo so they must have thought it was a concern

So either the US was hopelessly optimistic, or you do have to hit the silos, leaving plenty of warheads left

Edit: Wiki backs me up, there is 1 Missile alert facility for every 10 missiles that it controls, and each of the 5 in every squadron of 50 can launch all 50 in the squadron, so that's 45 targets just for ICBMs

So China can in no way destroy enough of the US nuclear forces to reduce the amount coming at them even assuming the US does not launch on warning
 
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What RamscoopRaider said. Also, even if China successfully knocks out all the control centers, the missiles and warheads are still there. All that means is they buy a few weeks to days until the missiles are ready for use once again. And I suspect, although I don't know, that the missiles China had in the 90s were too inaccurate to reliably hit hardened targets like missile LCCs. And even if they did somehow take out the ICBMs, that still leaves the boomers, which are where the vast majority of the present US operational strategic weapons reside anyway.

For that matter, I may be misremembering - it's been a while since I read the book I got this from - but I believe that back in the Cold War, at least, they also had airborne launch command posts that could take over if the ground posts were knocked out. But a) I'm not sure they still do that, and b) I may be confusing something they wanted to do with something they actually did.
 
What does China gain from going Counterforce?

30 nukes are not enough to destroy or even seriously cripple US nuclear capability, 1 Ohio can essentially wipe out China and at least one will be at sea at any given time and given that US communication with them was designed to hold up to an Alpha strike by the USSR China cannot cut this, heck the US ICBM force was designed to ride out an alpha strike by the Russians as well, and given hostilities all the available boomers would be at sea and I think there were plans to disperse the bombers

So even if they go counterforce on the US, the US still retains the capability to destroy them completely and utterly

So they have nothing to gain from doing counter force

The US has the nukes to do Counter value and Counter force at the same time once China launches and probably will, China cannot do the same and has to choose one or the other

Counter force gets them nothing, they still lose, they can't cripple US nuclear capability and the US would not use the whole arsenal on them anyways, overkill on them (I think someone calculated a few % of it could kill 90% of China if used right), Counter value gives them satisfaction and seriously hurts the US for at least a generation

If you are losing a war (only reason China would go nuclear) which would you choose?

China has MIRV capability, so if 20 missiles get through with 10 warheads each. 200 nukes are enough to bring down the US...
 
China has MIRV capability, so if 20 missiles get through with 10 warheads each. 200 nukes are enough to bring down the US...

Do you have a citation for that? I usually go by "Nuclear Notebook"; they're not perfect, but they're probably as good as you can get in the open-source world:

2011 Nuclear Notebook said:
China has approximately 140 land-based,
nuclear-capable ballistic missiles of six
types: the DF-3A, DF-4, DF-5A, DF-21,
DF-31, and DF-31A. Only the DF-5A is
silo-based; the rest are in some way
mobile, which helps to increase their
survivability. The US intelligence com-
munity has consistently assessed all six
missile types as single-warhead weap-
ons, but the Pentagon recently repeated
its projection that China may also be
developing a new road-mobile ICBM
[intercontinental ballistic missile], pos-
sibly capable of carrying a multiple inde-
pendently targeted re-entry vehicle
(MIRV) (Defense Department, 2011: 3).

The 140 figure includes both a number of missiles that cannot reach the US and 20-40 DF-31s and -31As that weren't deployed until 2006. According to the later breakdown, China is estimated to possess about 20 CSS-4/DF-5A ICBMs capable of reaching the US, about 12 CSS-3/DF-4 ballistic missiles capable of reaching Alaska but not the CONUS, plus 12 CSS-NX-3/JL-1 SLBMs that were probably not operational. All missiles are believed to be single warhead. The DF-5A is thought to have a 4-5 MT warhead, the DF-4 3.3 MT, and the JL-1 200-300 kT.

These estimates may or may not be accurate; I certainly wouldn't bet on it. But we probably aren't going to find anything better in the public domain.
 
Do you have a citation for that? I usually go by "Nuclear Notebook"; they're not perfect, but they're probably as good as you can get in the open-source world:

I am not going to wait for an announcement from Beijing, if they are testing prototypes (not counting the JL-2 systems) I would wager they have things they do not know about. And apparently they have tested a MIRV capable missile:
http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-df-3a-mirv-multiple-us-targets-one-missle-2012-12
 
I am not going to wait for an announcement from Beijing, if they are testing prototypes (not counting the JL-2 systems) I would wager they have things they do not know about. And apparently they have tested a MIRV capable missile:
http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-df-3a-mirv-multiple-us-targets-one-missle-2012-12

The thread is about a war in 1998. The DF-31A didn't become operational until 2007. I'm sure China is building towards a large MIRVed ballistic missile force - I would be if I was them. And, given the opacity of China's nuclear forces, I suppose it's possible that they were hiding a MIRV capability for all this time. But I would want to see some evidence that they, in fact, had that capability in 1998 before I believe it.
 
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