re: if China blockaded Taiwan tomorrow, what should US do?

All solid choices, I’ll add one. Cease exports of chicken, pork, soy beans, rice and any other food commodities.

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I have a good friend who is a captain in the Air Force. He is in strategic logistics planning, specifically focused on the Asian theater.

Long story short, if China really decides they want to take Taiwan, there’s not much we can do about it. We can make it costly, but at the end of the day, it’s right off their coast and almost a half a world away from the United States.

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This is the long and short of it.

We can't even guarantee global trade through the Strait of Hormuz with three carrier groups patrolling the Gulf. How are we going to keep China out of the Taiwan Strait?

The answer is Taiwan is going to be subsumed into Chinese Communist system. Our planning for this one possibility needs to be reducing dependence on Taiwanese semiconductor.

There's two options. We either let them have Taiwan and we help negotiate terms, or nuclear war is imminent.

Literally any other scenario you can imagine leads to those two outcomes.

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No … that’s a terrible analogy… we don’t want the bonds paid… have never asked… the bonds allow us a foothold in Taiwan… look it up the bonds are still on both countries books… there more akin to the myth of foreign debt

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You are either a Taiwanese bot or you cant read. They will only repaid when China is reunited, which will never happen, which is exactly why they have stated that.

The bonds offer us no foothold in Taiwan because they will not be repaid until China is reunited.

They welched on the debt and should repay it before we give any more support to those thieves.

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My IQ is above 140 and you?

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No it is not. If you cannot figure out how taking out the Three Gorges Dam would do the things I said it would do, you are, in fact, a frickin retard.

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There would be a few million deaths, but in a country of 800 million? Some of their big cities would suffer catastrophic temporary flooding, but it would recede on its own when the reservoir was exhausted. Most of these areas would not suffer scouring floodwaters, although they would be flooded

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There are 400 million people that live downstream from the Three Gorges Dam. Now, not all of them would be killed obviously, but estimates range into the many millions killed initially. Then you have 10s of millions of acres of farmland that would be flooded out. Cities like Wuhan (11 million people) would be wiped out. Shanghai would be partially destroyed and the world's busiest container port would be severely affected. Then you would have disease outbreak. The damages would be unfathomable and would 100% lead to global market crash.

It would be a catastrophic humanitarian, economic, and strategic disaster on an historic scale. This is not hyperbole. It is a fact.

It would be worse than using a nuke and would not be done except as a measure of last resort.

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Cities like Wuhan (11 million people) would be wiped out.

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Some of what you posted is true, some is hyperbole. For example:

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Cities like Wuhan (11 million people) would be wiped out.

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That is hyperbole. Wuhan is over 150 miles from the dam. It would not be wiped out; it would suffer a catastrophe not quite as bad as what New Orleans went through in Katrina. Low lying areas would be flooded. The city would have to be almost completely evacuated, but it would be rebuilt just as NOLA was.

It would take place in a country that is poorer than America, and one that could not focus on Wuhan the way America focused on Katrina, but still, Wuhan would not be wiped out.

When you say it would be worse than a nuke, it depends on the nuke and where it is deployed. And it depends on if we are talking body count or economic damage, and long term or short.

FTR, here is what ChatGPT said…

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At a very high level, a sudden catastrophic failure of Three Gorges Dam could plausibly kill more people than a single nuclear strike on a major Chinese city—but the uncertainty is enormous, and the answer depends heavily on assumptions. Here’s why: Scenario 1: A single very large nuclear detonation over a megacity If a very large nuclear weapon struck a city like Shanghai: Immediate deaths would come from: * blast collapse of buildings * thermal burns / firestorm * acute radiation near ground zero * infrastructure collapse (hospitals, water, power) Secondary deaths: * untreated injuries * fires * contamination * disease / displacement A single strike could cause very large casualties, potentially in the millions, depending on weapon size, burst height, weather, evacuation, and construction type. But: * the destruction is concentrated in a finite radius, * many people outside the core zone survive, * response can focus geographically. Scenario 2: Sudden catastrophic Three Gorges collapse A rapid release of reservoir water creates a massive downstream flood disaster affecting a very long corridor of the Yangtze River basin. Potential effects: * immediate drowning * collapse of bridges / housing * failure of downstream levees and dams * industrial chemical release * sewage contamination * prolonged displacement * famine / water shortages * disease outbreaks afterward What makes it uniquely dangerous: it affects many cities, not one. Downstream exposure includes large population centers such as: * Yichang * Jingzhou * Wuhan * farther downstream urban and industrial zones If warnings failed or evacuations were insufficient, casualties could be extremely high, potentially rivaling or exceeding a single nuclear strike. The key difference A nuclear strike: * higher immediate lethality per square mile * intense destruction in one metro area A dam-collapse megaflood: * lower peak lethality locally than ground zero * but affects vast geography * deaths can continue for weeks/months from secondary effects My best assessment Most likely immediate deaths: ? single large nuclear strike may kill more in the first hours Most likely total deaths over time in a worst-case collapse: ? Three Gorges catastrophic failure could exceed that because of: * scale, * cascading infrastructure failures, * long-duration humanitarian fallout. That said, both scenarios are highly uncertain and catastrophic on a historic scale.

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