Biden says US will defend Taiwan if China attacks

submitted by TheJamesRocket from self.debatealtright

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[–]TheJamesRocket[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (9 children)

This is a major development. The United States has previously maintained an ambigous position in regards to Taiwan. Now, there is a real possibility that a regional war could break out between the U.S. and China.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

If it does, it's WW3. Everybody wants Taiwan, either free or for their own.

[–]Blackbrownfreestuff 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

Why is Taiwan so valuable? How does owning this island benefit whoever takes it?

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

They produce 80% of the world's integrated circuit silicon chips.

[–]Blackbrownfreestuff 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Would it be easier for china or another nation to start producing their own chips, rather than invading Taiwan? In a hypothetical scenario china invadesTaiwan, how long would chip.production be offline?

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

A lot less long than it would take for China to develop their own 3 nM EUV lithography process. There's more to making chips than a few engineers and a plant.

FABs as they are called are very high level cleanrooms. And any such cleanroom is already not easy to achieve anywhere anytime. But on top of that, this cleanroom has heavy machinery operating in it, while the requirement for that level of purity is constant and continuous. And that's just the building.

Then you start talking about the actual lithography process and that requires physicists and engineers who have whole careers behind them in this business, because every single process node ( the size of transistors within these chips ) is more complex and more prone to errors than the previous. So essentially this means that the Taiwanese expertise is pretty much impossible to replace.

And the silicon wafers. At the current and future process nodes, these wafers have to be perfect almost to the atomic level. Just the expertise for making these would be problematic to develop.

Certainly Israelis aren't going to do it, since they've had untold trouble with even a 5-year-old 10 nM process, which they aren't even yet able to produce while it is a completely obsolete process now.

So the expertise at the newer process nodes is all Taiwanese. Re-engineering it would take at least 10 years with tons and tons of industrial espionage. I don't think the Chinese have it in them to achieve this at all, or they would have done it already.

[–]Blackbrownfreestuff 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Couldnt they just get Camtek and ASML to set it up for them?

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Camtek don't have the knowledge but I guess ASML might "set it up" for them. Still, there's much much more to making chips than operating machines. China accounts for maybe 10% of the world's production of semiconductor chips, and I don't know what their process nodes or expertise is, but clearly they could never compete with TSMC.

[–]casparvoneverecBig tiddy respecter 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

It's a vital forward operating base. If the US built a solid military presence on the island, from there they could carry out a devastating strategic bombing of South China. An analog would be the US airforce using British airbases in 1943-45 to bomb Germany. If Britain had exited the war, then the US could never have carried out the bombing of Germany.

Plus, since it stands at the entry to the South China sea, American aircraft based on the island could interdict and destroy the Chinese merchant navy. It's extremely vital that China prevent the US from possessing the island from a military standpoint.

[–]Blackbrownfreestuff 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Makes sense, so China could just draw a line in the sand about US placing military assets there instead of invading?