Manish_Sharma wrote:
Now after one country has bombed the other to pashan yug and the other has bombed the first to kansya yug. In next 100-200 years and longer run wouldn't the country which had been hit with smaller warheads on its bigger spreadout cities get advantage to race ahead of the other?
Of course. Why 100-200 years? Even in the next few weeks the Chinese could more easily bring relief supplies to their cities which we have bombed. Their B-Country (rural and unpopulated areas) would be relatively untouched because we have only kiloton devices and we are only going to use them in airbursts over the cities.
They would face no fallout because we will not have carried out any groundstrikes (which require MT-plus weapons).
They could still use their fundamentally superior infrastructure to transport supplies because we will not have taken out their transportation hubs (which, again, requires high-yield weapons to achieve effectively).
The resources and supplies they have stored in their B-country would not be touched, because we will be spending all of our kiloton-yield weapons on their cities alone. Considerable portions of their industrial and agricultural production base will survive intact because our limited arsenal will not damage them at all.
And they would have plenty of unaffected B-country space to efficiently re-locate the survivors of their bombed cities, thus avoiding potentially far higher numbers of civilian casualties compared to the numbers killed in the initial strike.
Compare this to India on the receiving end of a comprehensive Chinese nuclear attack: groundstrikes creating long-term fallout, crippling our infrastructure, rendering large parts of our B-Country useless or inaccessible, destroying our means of production and logistic assets.
And all this is assuming that their first-strike megaton weapons don't knock out the bulk of our strategic assets, preventing us from launching any sort of meaningful retaliation at all.
There is no question to any sensible observer that we will have it far worse in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Chinese, because their arsenal is qualitatively and quantitatively superior to ours.
No amount of semantic gerrymandering over the meaning of "deterrence", no blanket declarations that "it is absurd to make assumptions about what the enemy thinks", can detract from this extremely simple fact.
We cannot know "what they are thinking", but we do know-- and they also know-- that they have more capacity to damage us than we have to damage them. If deterrence is based on the capacity to inflict damage (what else?), the conclusion is obvious.
Maybe after all it is best to recognize that "deterrence" is a term devoid of any inherent meaning whatsoever (just as well, because if you never know what is going to "deter" your enemy then pursuing "deterrence" is by definition a hopeless goal).
Today, "deterrence" is simply the excuse cited by nations for activities which actually amount to preparing for the contingency of having to fight a nuclear war... nothing less, nothing more. It is a fluffy term with no more actual substance than "war on terror" or "enemies of freedom".
And in preparing a suitable arsenal for the contingency of a nuclear war against the Chinese... we have a very long way to go indeed.