WI: Taiwan develops nuclear weapons
- Thread starter SealTheRealDeal
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Trust me, the PRC in late 80s / early 90s was in no position to do any of the above.
That's in 2021. It appears that the OP is talking about the late 1980s, early 1990s.
fair point, my assumption is the programme has probably carried on in even secreter secret than before. The big issue is do they have a deployment method?
It depends on how Taiwan was to deploy those warheads. If Taiwan only had the capability to deploy them with bombs, then the Chinese may gamble and attack.
Things get more complicated once the Taiwanese get a delivery system that cannot be neutralized easily --> cruise missiles on a submarine for instance, which is basically what Israel did in the past years, as it seems.
A 10MT city buster is not trivial to develop, BTW. The same applies to ICBMs. The Chinese may see what Taiwan is trying to develop / build and preemptively strike. It's easier to hide the development of a few nukes in the range of a couple hundred kilotons. But developing a multimegaton warhead on top of an MRBM/ICBM to Beijing without getting noticed is a totally different story.
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Deleted member 2186
It would be the same relation as they have now, Israel has nuclear weapons and not much has changed in their relationship with the United States.
The difference is that the US does not officially recognize Palestine in place of Israel, whereas the US does recognize the PRC rather than the RoC.
Deleted member 2186
But the PRC only was recognized by the majority of the world from 1971 onwards when it took the seat of the ROC in the UN.
Any ROC nuclear weapons would be to use against any PRC invasion fleet ore staging bases.
The ROC has no way of building a 10 MT city buster, much less delivering it.
The 1991 Gulf War was big shock to the Chinese leadership, since its military shared many commonalities in equipment and doctrine with Saddam's. Also, by the early-to-mid 90s, the PLA had become insanely corrupt, with military units openly starting their own business empires which were traded on the stock market. All it could do was pelt missiles that landed just off the Taiwanese coast, which is what occurred in 1996.
And despite all the PRC's antics the world hasn't really looked back. The US-RoC relationship simply isn't nearly as strong as the US' total adoration of Israel.
Another failing of your Israel analogy is that the US not only hasn't pressured Israel to dismantle its stock pile, it actively helps cover up its existence. Where as pressure from US is what ended the Taiwanese nuclear program. By all accounts the US at the time viewed the RoC's nuclear program as a destabilizing factor, not a welcome one. Which is not to say that the US is going to cut Taiwan off (at least more than it already had by that point), but it'd be naive to assume there'd be no fallout from Taiwan doing something the US expressly wished it didn't.
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I think the biggest consequence would be that the PRC would decrease trade and diplomatic activity with Taiwan out of protest. A more Cold War-like atmosphere across the strait would have all kinds of knock-on-effects, since IOTL a lot of China's growth came from the contributions made by ROC businesses. The PRC would still grow, but perhaps not as rapidly. In Taiwan, I can see the worse cross-strait relationship encouraging the KMT to continue its ideological crusade against the CCP. They will probably win more elections (or simply delay the implementation of free elections), but the same trends as IOTL where the younger people prefer the DPP will likely still be present in this scenario.
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marathag
Banned
Once you can do a fission bomb, you can make boosted fission designs that can scale up with the 'layer cake' method with the solid Lithium Deuterium. That material releases Tritium under nuclear events that release Neutrons, and increases efficiency of the fission device.
It's far cheaper and easier than getting Tritium gas alone, but limits you to 'only' 1MT warheads
Would China really need to invade Taiwan in case China felt threatened by Taiwan? Couldn't they simply obliterate it with nukes?
Even if they did so, how are they going to launch it (the British Green Bamboo proposal was well over three tons).
And the ROC still has to produce/procure lithium deuterium, that sort of infrastructure is going to be noticed a lot easier (even if an ASB hides other preexisting fission nuclear weapons activity).
A couple big things have changed in recent years with respect to the Taiwan-China thing.
First, China built the 3 gorges dam. That is a screaming nuclear target in the same way as the Aswan High Dam is in Egypt. And it puts China in the same category as Egypt and Israel---the proverbial one nuke countries, as in, would suffer absolutely catastrophic damage from even a single successful nuke used against them (Israel is in the category primarily due to its small size).
Second, Taiwan is nearly producing a majority of the world's semiconductors (TSMC). That alone makes the conflict between the two of intense concern to pretty much everyone.
First, China built the 3 gorges dam. That is a screaming nuclear target in the same way as the Aswan High Dam is in Egypt. And it puts China in the same category as Egypt and Israel---the proverbial one nuke countries, as in, would suffer absolutely catastrophic damage from even a single successful nuke used against them (Israel is in the category primarily due to its small size).
Second, Taiwan is nearly producing a majority of the world's semiconductors (TSMC). That alone makes the conflict between the two of intense concern to pretty much everyone.
China's going to likely respond to a successful (and keep in mind the 3 Gorges is gigantic) strike on the Three Gorges with a nuclear response.