I recently read this article from John Bellamy foster where he mentions that the US strategists think they can engage in “limited nuclear war”, that is, use nuclear weapons on “tactical” targets and keep nuclear war at a “low” level.
Supposedly, the idea is that the US moves up from low level targets to more important targets, and that at each stage, the Chinese will not escalate because escalation would be top costly for the Chinese (since the Chinese only have ICBMs, their only option of escalation is MAD).
Aparantly, this strategy has also become part of official US doctrine.
My first thought on this is that this strategy is completely insane, because China will not allow it to be played out. If 1 nuke goes off all of them go off.
My second thought on this is that I have no idea what the actual Chinese nuclear policy is, other than their statement to never use nukes in a first strike capacity. Does anybody know of any sources that go into detail on this?
They’ve already shut down US pipelines before, and they’re already inside US cellular networks.
A war wouldn’t just be nukes flying around, critical infrastructure would also be heavily targeted, and the US has not been maintaining their assets at all. There are power plants that have been running for nearly 100 years at this point.