Re:Pentagon to Retire USS Truman Early, Shrinking Carrier Fl...
by sitharus on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @04:04PM
(#19266916)
China has a "no first use" policy with nuclear weapons, so it's entirely possible for a conventional war to be fought. They do have a large range of conventionally-armed missiles though, so I have no idea how the escalation path would go.
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Re:Pentagon to Retire USS Truman Early, Shrinking Carrier Fl...
by XorNot on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @04:19PM
(#19267038)
The problem is a conventional ballistic missile launch of the type you use to sink a carrier is indistinguishable to a nuclear ballistic launch and you can't really vector trajectories very far in advance of losing counterstrike capability.
They're effectively not usable.
Re:Pentagon to Retire USS Truman Early, Shrinking Carrier Fl...
by tomatotomato37 on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @06:16PM
(#19267783)
That's only for some of the cold war tech; modern missiles don't use a ballestic trajectory but instead actively fly a path optimized for avoiding point-defense