Article 5 only applies to attacks in Europe or North America. The SCS is definitely in neither.

Fair, though in practice they would join in anyway - China would be going for them next. Better to fight with the US than alone.

Presumably the US would find itself in such a situation because it tried to stop the invasion of Taiwan. China will never have the interest or capabilities of going after Europe.

Interesting. Edge case: if French Guyana (off the north side of South America but considered part of France and the European Union) is the victim of an attack by some means, are NATO members obliged to act in its defense?

No. The same is true of New Caledonia (most of overseas France, actually).

Nor the Falkland Islands, which is probably a more likely (although still unlikely) trouble spot.

Fair point. 2/3 of the armada (modulo dry dock) is still coming to the fight.

That’s absolutely right if course. Taking out a carrier group, or even several carrier groups is if course doable, but by itself it isn’t an objective. It’s a means to an end, so without a strategic context it doesn’t mean anything.

I've read its actually very hard to find an aircraft carrier in the open ocean, and even if you have found it, difficult to target because it will be be moving at 30 knots in a zigzag pattern?

That's true for subsonic low altitude missiles yes.

For a missile going Mach 7 at 25km altitude, the carrier has no hope of moving enough in the 9 minutes it has to evade the missile.

So you only have to find the carrier once briefly, which is not so hard.

Let us assume that at launch the missile had the location of the carrier as provided by satellite one hour ago.

How is the final phase of flight and targeting going to work? How far away can on-board sensors detect the carrier, and does the missile have the maneuverability to steer towards the target in that timeframe?

Nobody except Japan maybe UK and Australia is likely to do anything.

US itself is likely to turn tail and run if attack in not nuclear. Nuclear attack might inject some spine into response.

> The trick isn't to take out one aircraft carrier: its to to be able to take them all out.

Hypersonic missiles and nukes cost a lot less than a carrier. Assuming their surveillance doesn't get taken out, they can spam missiles.

China will have to have good signals intelligence for this to work, though.

A nuclear attack will ensure proportional response.

What is a proportionate response if most of China's army and navy are on the mainland? Nuclear strikes on the mainland?

Yes, is it surprising in any way? Nobody would have raised an eyebrow at this concept back during the Cold War, just shows how comfortable in peace we are now. The concept of unilateral nuclear strike did not exist; all models were of nuclear exchanges and question was only if it could happen in any limited way or escalate into a total one.

Both game-theoretic calculus and political pressure at home would make nuclear retaliation unavoidable, and with the perspective of escalation China is firmly on the losing end.

It's not surprising, it just isn't exactly proportionate (well it is by one definition of the word I suppose). That strike would cause China to retaliate against the US homeland, wouldn't it? And the retaliation for that would aim to dismantle China's military and industrial base.

If that's the case then I can't see how isolated tactical nukes against carriers makes sense for China. They might as well throw everything they have to begin with.

I mean, sure: that's what my original point was, it's not just nuking the carrier group. China knows the dynamic, the likely escalation route from that and it knows at the end of it, it lays in radioactive ruin. Nuking is just not an option; even a conventional attack (with much less guarantee of success) is already a pathway to full scale war, just not immediately nuclear.

> not just nuking the carrier group

US/USSR were prepared for theatre level nuclear engagements, as long as not on USSR or US soil. I would not dismiss trading tactical nukes on third party soil if things get desperate. PRC SCS islands, US indo-pac bases, carrier groups are no brainers. Up to US bases in Japan and Australia. I think we dismiss low level nuke engagement at peril, any competent war planner will keep it in the repertoire.

> PRC SCS islands, US indo-pac bases, carrier groups are no brainers.

PRC SCS islands are sand piles with a couple of barracks and a landing strip, that would not be an equal trade for a carrier group.

> US/USSR were prepared for theatre level nuclear engagements, as long as not on USSR or US soil.

I dunno what America was prepared for, but I was in USSR at the time and the public message was any nuclear confrontation will end up being a total one.

It's not an equal trade, but it's as close to proportional tactical/theatre level nuclear retaliation as US can get, PRC simply doesn't have many overseas bases / vunerabilities for US to target. Vast majority of PRC forces are on the mainland which is... basically the top of the escalation ladder, and opens up CONUS + territories for proportional retaliation.

Otherwise, SCS bases are substantial forward deployment positions for PRC. Conventionally neutralizing SCS bases would require 100s of ordnance from naval platforms in a mostly secondary theatre - substantial amount of what US can concentrate in region. The bases serve missile sinks by design. So in a sense, taking them out via tactical nuke versus expending significant in theater munitions is an appropriate trade.

>public message

There's a lot of (declassified) literature on nonstrategic nuclear weapons and scenarios, war plans for theatre level use in Europe and Asia. Here's a report from this July.

https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RL32572.pdf

Public messaging is going to play up MAD, but nonstrategic nukes has never been off the table. PRC has no first use, but one never knows. Especially since the engagements are likely maritime over empty waters, which has different escalatory potential than scenarios of nuking NATO/USSR buffer countries during cold war. It's not that I think it's likely, just the chances are less non-zero than what's publically presented, i.e. the 2021 report exists in the first place because US wonks are at least discussing tactical nukes which are not subject to arms control agreements.

Well that's really what I was getting at with my question, so if that's also what you were suggesting then we're both questioning the previous poster's idea that they can just happily "spam" nuclear missiles at all of America's carriers around the globe, let alone even a single one operating near China's waters.

  > China knows the dynamic, the likely escalation route

There is no likely escalation route. To escalate to full nuclear war requires what we would today call "a crazy man" in power. The US has had exactly one of those in the past 30+ years, and he's no longer in office.

Oh, that must be why the US famously retaliated to 9/11 by also destroying 3 buildings in Tora-Borah.

If China nukes several thousand U.S. servicemen, your family (and probably you) would be on the streets demanding blood.

I've never even heard of Tora-Borah, so maybe I'm ignorant.

But for one thing, I wouldn't say that an authority that authorizes the destruction of three buildings would authorize a nuclear strike. For another, destroying three buildings in some village in Afghanistan does not sound like and "escalation" in response to the half dozen or so buildings destroyed in New York on the date you specify, and the damage to the Pentagon, and the loss of four aircraft and all souls on board, and I don't know how many more on the ground.

Sorry that was irony. My point was precisely that American vengeance knew no bounds. There is zero chance that a nuclear strike on an American asset will not be met in kind.

Yeah, but would you want to bet on it? You’d have to be either really really stupid, or really really smart, but we’d only find out afterwards.