In recent conservative gathering they discuss Taiwan war scenario and this war monger Pillsburry spew his nonsense an s both Goldman and Anton rebut his nonsense
Pillsbury: Well, we could turn to you and say, I surrender.
Anton: What would you do if you were either the secretary of defense, the president, the head of a Pacific Command and sitting there in Pearl Harbor?
Pillsbury: I’ve been working on this for 30 years. More recently, the US has gotten a much more detailed picture of what it could do. Exactly which targets inside China could be struck. What would happen the first morning?
More and more work is being done on both sides about how a war would happen and both the Chinese and American military have come to a conclusion. It would be a long war. Okay, maybe two or three years – I haven’t read.
There’s a brand new book by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon under Trump [Elbridge Colby’s
, featured in a June 2021
]. There’s a whole chapter on how to recapture Taiwan after it’s been partially taken by the Chinese military.
This is the state of the art thinking. There’s a new piece of legislation, the Taiwan Defense Act … They say, please, Pentagon, give us a plan for how to avoid a
fait accompli taking place on Taiwan. The Pentagon is drafting their response.
We’re moving closer to a war. It doesn’t help for you to tell conservatives, oh, if we lose an aircraft carrier, what are we going to do then? What would Winston Churchill say?
Goldman: What, Winston Churchill? Just before the fall of Singapore in 1942, according to Andrew Roberts, Winston Churchill said in the event of war “the Japanese would fold up like the Italians because there were the wops of the Far East.”
Winston Churchill, when it came to Asia, was an absolute idiot, and we bailed him out. He was as stupid as Nicholas II who lost the Russian fleet at Tsushima [in 1905]. Bridge Colby has been a dear friend for 20 years who is now hallucinating about what the United States might do to take Taiwan back. This is crazy.
Anton: Following the logic of what you said – because I haven’t read whatever STRATCOM put out – I have read certain analyses: not even analysis. There’s speculations that the Chinese are increasing the size of the nuclear arsenal in this underground network of tunnels that we can’t follow and so on.
The official estimate that we have some confidence in is that the Chinese nuclear arsenal is at least 300 warheads, right? None of which have to be air-dropped anymore. That means all [delivered by] ICBM. And if you read their doctrine, unlike ours, they formally take a doctrine of minimal deterrence.
That is to say, they have no kind of nuclear warfighting doctrine at all. They just have city killers. And if they feel that the territorial integrity of China or the survival of the state is at stake, they’re willing to use those 300 missiles or some portion of them on American cities.
In fact, once as I’m sure you remember in the far-off year of 1996 on one of the more tense moments in the Taiwan Strait, a Chinese general was quoted as saying, “I don’t think the Americans will do anything at the end of the day. They won’t want to trade Los Angeles for Taipei.”
Their nuclear arsenal is now triple what it was. And they’re going on a more offensive posture with nuclear weapons and this thing ends up going to nuclear war. How that fits into the seeming recommendation you just gave, I have to admit, being somewhat dim, I don’t see because it would seem to make the danger greater.
And I also would ask: What do you think the American people’s response to losing a fleet carrier would be? My own estimate is it would be the greatest psychological shock we’ve had in a generation, arguably greater than 9/11.
Unquestionably, getting one single city nuked would be the greatest psychological shock the American nation has ever had in its history. So how do we deal with something like that, given that Taiwan is orders of magnitude more important to China, and they’re willing to do that over this, as they have said, than it is to us?
Well, I’m going to be the dove here and say that it’s possible to avoid a nuclear war, whether it be over Taiwan or any other place. I’d kind of prefer to do that. If that makes me an outlier, I’m at least I’m in good company with that other famous nuclear dove named Ronald Reagan.
