Taiwan's decision to produce no less than 500 cruise missiles capable of threatening southern China dramatically escalates its missile arms race with the People's Republic of China and may tempt China toward taking preemptive military action in the 2008-2010 period.
According to the author of the UPI article (a senior news analyst, no less), this is highly disturbing:
Even with only conventional warheads, a massive cruise missile force deployed on Taiwan could pose a very serious national security threat to China: The reported 360-mile range of the Hsiung Feng would put the Hong Kong and Shanghai, the financial hub of China, within its range.
Also, Taiwan's cruise missile force might not stay merely conventionally armed. Taiwan's advanced industrial economy already has nuclear reactors and, like Japan, South Korea and many other advanced industrial nations, Taiwan has capability to develop its own nuclear weaponry probably within only a few months if its leaders thought it faced an overwhelming national emergency.
The bottom line?
Would China sit back and allow Taiwan to effectively guarantee its perpetual de facto independence for the foreseeable future by deploying the kind of missile capability that, it could be argued, would be comparable to the one the Soviet Union tried to place in Cuba in the early 1960s to threaten the United States from close at hand?
President John F, Kennedy did not sit back and allow the Soviets and their communist Cuban allies. Instead, he risked a full-scale nuclear war in the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962 to force the withdrawal of the missiles. Will China's President Hu Jintao go as far as JFK did in dealing with the missiles of Taiwan? Or might he even go further?
Excuse me while I wipe away the Labatt I spewed on my screen when reading that part.
What is the author talking about? Is he serious? I recall the Janes news item and it did not prompt me to haul out Missiles of October to recall our brush with a nuclear war. Why? Because just because we had a "missile" crisis in 1962 does not mean that a story about "missiles" in 2006 is the same thing. For as the article notes, Taiwan has not in fact put nuclear warheads on the missiles. Nor does Taiwan currently have nuclear warheads. Nor is anyone claiming they are trying to do so, though if anybody can claim to need a deterrent force against a larger enemy committed to its conquest it is Taiwan.
And I do believe this forgets who the communist aggressor was in 1962 and who is the communist aggressor in 2006. If the planned 500 Taiwanese cruise missiles to be pointed at China and fired in retaliation (and remember that by 2010 only 50 are actually planned) are such a terrible thing armed with conventional warheads, why aren't the 700 existing Chinese ballistic missiles pointed at Taiwan (augmented by 50 a year, it seems) a terrible thing right now? When China already has nuclear weapons it could presumably add to its force? When China is the one that might use them first? I mean, we do have an actual island in both cases, but if this is the key then Ceylon, Madagascar, and even Britain must be terrible threats to the mainlands they loom over.
Why is a democracy planning to defend itself "destabilizing" when the plans of a dictatorship to conquer or intimidate a democracy is not?
And why does this threaten to drag in America any more than China's long-standing determination to absorb Taiwan whether the Taiwanese assent or not?
Look, 500 conventional warheads are not going to smash China. They won't. It is silly to assert they would. How much tonnage did Germany drop on Britain without destroying the British? How much did we drop on Germany or Japan? Or on North Vietnam? If these missiles carry one-ton payloads we have only 500 tons of high explosives. Or a little over 8 pounds per person. I think China's economy can handle this attack potential as something a little less than a threat to its very survival.
Certainly, if Taiwan can accurately target Chinese ports or airfields, Taiwan will be better able to disrupt any invasion debarkation points and better defend itself.
But I don't see how this is in any way bad. It is certainly no crisis.
Mad Minerva is, well, rather mad, at the cited article and gives it both barrels and a beating with the cluestick:
I am tired of analysts and pundits and various windbags pontificating on the cross-Strait situation as if the "bad guy" is Taiwan. I am sick of these same blowhards implying that it is up to Taiwan and/or the United States to prevent a cross-Strait war with China. Hello, people, China is just as involved as Taiwan and the US -- and, I'll argue, more so. Lest we all forget, China's the one who has 700+ missiles pointed at Taiwan and the saber-rattling, bullying rhetoric to go with them.
Who's the "bad guy," the "aggressor"? Oh, let me see . . . A tiny, free, democratic island of 23 million or an unrepentant autocratic behemoth of more than 1 billion. I won't even start on human rights abuses in China or the 2+ million troops in the PLA.
As MM notes, war is not inevitable. Although Russia, I think, would be happy if America and China went to war and dropped each other down a few rungs on the power scale.
