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Fighting a war over an industry reliant on large, immobile, extremely vulnerable factories/laboratories is really, really, really, really, really, really, reall

Fighting a war over an industry reliant on large, immobile, extremely vulnerable factories/laboratories is really, really, really, really, really, really, really stupid. If China invaded Taiwan to controls fabs, the USA would just destroy them with air power. And that's assuming Taiwan didn't sabotage them first.

est31 5y ago
I read somewhere that the fabs are already equipped with bombs that can be made to explode if there is an invasion from China. Considering how clean those places have to be in order to work, this can cause immense damage to those fabs.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  IIRC the fabs are Dutch made too, so it’s not clear if you could rebuild them with knowledge and material in Taiwan alone.
  - est31 5y ago
    Yeah thanks to the fact that you need international collaboration to scale cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing it's very unlikely that a single nation, even if they discovered general AI, could terrorize the world with an autonomous robot army, because even general AI needs chips to run on.
- marcyb5st 5y ago
  Not sure they have bombs but they are pretty delicate. In reality China has another option. They could just demand semiconductors or else they would close the tap on rare-earth elements [1] and by doing so crashing the economy. Even more so if they annex/invade Vietnam. Other countries have availability, but only China has the supply chain to extract and process these elements at scale. For any other player to step up production to match current demand it would take years. [1] https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/geopolitics-rare-earth-elements https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/geopolitics-rare-eart...
  - skhr0680 5y ago
    China already tried that trick with Japan and it turned out to not be a big deal. > Even more so if they annex/invade Vietnam. Don’t you think that will start WWIII in itself? Vietnam definitely won’t go down without fight, and they have a pretty good track record.
- rhacker 5y ago
  It seems pretty weird to go to work everyday with bombs set all over the factory you work in. What if it blows up by accident or a disgruntled worker pulls the bomb lever.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  I don't believe that for a moment. Much more likely the complex machines could be simply disabled and their firmware wiped by remote management. This happens with other stuff too, you can't even stealthily move it, because of embedded GPS and the like. edit: Apart from that, what would that stupid act do to the economy of the involved parties, and the world in general? It's all interwoven. Fuck it all, and great reset, or what?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
DecoPerson 5y ago
Unless in the lead up to war each country hides its valuable targets. They could probably create hundreds of decoy facilities within a few months to throw attackers off the mark. I’d bet the big players already have plans for introducing decoy trucks, trains, planes & ships in the event a war breaks out in our age of unlimited surveillance.
- jrockway 5y ago
  > Unless in the lead up to war each country hides its valuable targets. They could probably create hundreds of decoy facilities within a few months to throw attackers off the mark. I mean... TSMC is right here: https://www.google.com/maps/search/tsmc/@24.7768163,120.9992936,13067m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/search/tsmc/@24.7768163,120.9992... If China wants it, their problem is not that they don't know where it is.
ashtonkem 5y ago
To be fair, fighting WW1 was predictably stupid. Sometimes countries do dumb things. This gets worse with autocrats, because their whims and delusions can have an outsized effect on national choices. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Taiwanese government hasn’t subtly signaled to China that the fans would be destroyed within 10minutes of an invasion. It would be stupid for them not too. Then again China is liable (but not guaranteed) to invade Taiwan less because of the fabs, and more because they consider Taiwan a rogue province that they want back.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  In what universe was WW1 predictably stupid. WW1 happened due to a complex series of treaties, nationalism, and many other things. Nobody thought it would get as bad as it did
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Yep, everybody thought the war would be a quick affaire. And an unavoidable at that, so most major powers wanted the war for various reasons.
    - brightball 5y ago
      You just described how the US civil war started too. Expected to be less than 3 months initially.
      - hef19898 5y ago
        Everyone ever was supposed to be home before Christmas, right?
        marcosdumay 5y ago
        I imagine nobody starts a war if they think it will be long.
  - deleted 5y ago
alberth 5y ago
>>"Fighting a war over an industry reliant on large, immobile, extremely vulnerable factories/laboratories is really, really, really, really, really, really, really stupid." Sounds like you just described the Oil/Gas industry, in which about a dozen wars have started over the last 100 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_war
- sisyphus_hill 5y ago
  yes but in an oil/gas war the same resources can be tapped again with new infrastructure. If you destroy one of ASML's machines you need to recreate the entire global supply chain that constructed it.
- somesortofthing 5y ago
  The difference is that it's basically impossible to take control of a fab the same way you can for an oil well. No matter your military advantage, the people you're trying to take the fab from will just destroy it, and odds are good that you can't rebuild it yourself. You may as well skip the war altogether and begin researching how to build your own fabs since you need to do that anyway.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    The people are also unique and essential to the fab in a way they aren’t for oil.
    - xxpor 5y ago
      And yet fabs aren't reliant on minerals that are rare and geographically concentrated (for the most part, I'm sure they rely on some rare earths. The point is silicon is hilariously common). Fabs also capture very little value. TSMC and Intel aren't the trillion dollar companies. Google, MS, Amazon, etc. are. So there's really no upside. Only the downside of a large fraction of the world's high end fab capacity disappearing overnight. It'd be one thing if one side of the US and China had their own backup capacity. But they don't. And they won't for at least a decade, in my non-expert opinion.
otikik 5y ago
Most wars are stupid. For some people it doesn't mater how stupid a war is. Only if it's profitable.
gorwell 5y ago
I would bet on the US letting them take it. Like they let the Taliban take Kabul. There's little appetite for starting a new war after Afghanistan, and wouldn't starting a war with China send civilization back to sticks and stones?
antman 5y ago
By the same train of thought, if USA stops the flow of semiconductors towards China, the game theory based proper response would be to bomb them to achieve parity?
mariodiana 5y ago
"U.S. tech firms rely on Taiwanese contract manufacturers to produce up to 90% of their chips […]" https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/13/semiconductor-shortage-us-tech-companies-and-their-reliance-on-taiwan.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/13/semiconductor-shortage-us-te... Okay, the U.S. destroys the Taiwanese fabs to keep them from communist China. Then what?
simplicio 5y ago
Plus while building fab plants is certainly difficult and expensive, its hard to imagine a cost-benefit analysis where fighting a major war is cheaper and easier then just..building your own fab plants.
- shoemakersteve 5y ago
  The cost-benefit analysis might look pretty decent to an arms manufacturer and their buddies and family members in congress/the senate.
  - simplicio 5y ago
    The Senate....of China?
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Fighting a war to destroy the factories that your strategic opponent depends on could be very smart, though...
gremloni 5y ago
That’s the problem. China will not invade Taiwan explicitly. They will gradually ramp up integration over a decade in small steps that the world will except until it is too late like for Hong Kong.
9999px 5y ago
…if China invaded _their own province_. A province over which their claim is stronger than the US' claim to Hawaii. I keep thinking there's hope to avoid this war, but the way people comment here and on Reddit (in abject ignorance of geopolitical reality), I fear it's inevitable. Fifteen (!) countries support Taiwanese sovereignty. The _rest of the world_ respects China's claim. It's insane that this rhetoric is even present in Americans' minds.
senectus1 5y ago
especially when for spare change a nation state can drop a rock on your factories with little chance of you doing anything about it.

est31 5y ago

I read somewhere that the fabs are already equipped with bombs that can be made to explode if there is an invasion from China. Considering how clean those places have to be in order to work, this can cause immense damage to those fabs.

ashtonkem 5y ago
IIRC the fabs are Dutch made too, so it’s not clear if you could rebuild them with knowledge and material in Taiwan alone.
- est31 5y ago
  Yeah thanks to the fact that you need international collaboration to scale cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing it's very unlikely that a single nation, even if they discovered general AI, could terrorize the world with an autonomous robot army, because even general AI needs chips to run on.
marcyb5st 5y ago
Not sure they have bombs but they are pretty delicate. In reality China has another option. They could just demand semiconductors or else they would close the tap on rare-earth elements [1] and by doing so crashing the economy. Even more so if they annex/invade Vietnam. Other countries have availability, but only China has the supply chain to extract and process these elements at scale. For any other player to step up production to match current demand it would take years. [1] https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/geopolitics-rare-earth-elements https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/geopolitics-rare-eart...
- skhr0680 5y ago
  China already tried that trick with Japan and it turned out to not be a big deal. > Even more so if they annex/invade Vietnam. Don’t you think that will start WWIII in itself? Vietnam definitely won’t go down without fight, and they have a pretty good track record.
rhacker 5y ago
It seems pretty weird to go to work everyday with bombs set all over the factory you work in. What if it blows up by accident or a disgruntled worker pulls the bomb lever.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
I don't believe that for a moment. Much more likely the complex machines could be simply disabled and their firmware wiped by remote management. This happens with other stuff too, you can't even stealthily move it, because of embedded GPS and the like. edit: Apart from that, what would that stupid act do to the economy of the involved parties, and the world in general? It's all interwoven. Fuck it all, and great reset, or what?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

DecoPerson 5y ago

Unless in the lead up to war each country hides its valuable targets. They could probably create hundreds of decoy facilities within a few months to throw attackers off the mark. I’d bet the big players already have plans for introducing decoy trucks, trains, planes & ships in the event a war breaks out in our age of unlimited surveillance.

jrockway 5y ago
> Unless in the lead up to war each country hides its valuable targets. They could probably create hundreds of decoy facilities within a few months to throw attackers off the mark. I mean... TSMC is right here: https://www.google.com/maps/search/tsmc/@24.7768163,120.9992936,13067m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/search/tsmc/@24.7768163,120.9992... If China wants it, their problem is not that they don't know where it is.

ashtonkem 5y ago

To be fair, fighting WW1 was predictably stupid. Sometimes countries do dumb things. This gets worse with autocrats, because their whims and delusions can have an outsized effect on national choices. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Taiwanese government hasn’t subtly signaled to China that the fans would be destroyed within 10minutes of an invasion. It would be stupid for them not too. Then again China is liable (but not guaranteed) to invade Taiwan less because of the fabs, and more because they consider Taiwan a rogue province that they want back.

NikolaeVarius 5y ago
In what universe was WW1 predictably stupid. WW1 happened due to a complex series of treaties, nationalism, and many other things. Nobody thought it would get as bad as it did
- hef19898 5y ago
  Yep, everybody thought the war would be a quick affaire. And an unavoidable at that, so most major powers wanted the war for various reasons.
  - brightball 5y ago
    You just described how the US civil war started too. Expected to be less than 3 months initially.
    - hef19898 5y ago
      Everyone ever was supposed to be home before Christmas, right?
      - marcosdumay 5y ago
        I imagine nobody starts a war if they think it will be long.
- deleted 5y ago

alberth 5y ago

>>"Fighting a war over an industry reliant on large, immobile, extremely vulnerable factories/laboratories is really, really, really, really, really, really, really stupid." Sounds like you just described the Oil/Gas industry, in which about a dozen wars have started over the last 100 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_war

sisyphus_hill 5y ago
yes but in an oil/gas war the same resources can be tapped again with new infrastructure. If you destroy one of ASML's machines you need to recreate the entire global supply chain that constructed it.
somesortofthing 5y ago
The difference is that it's basically impossible to take control of a fab the same way you can for an oil well. No matter your military advantage, the people you're trying to take the fab from will just destroy it, and odds are good that you can't rebuild it yourself. You may as well skip the war altogether and begin researching how to build your own fabs since you need to do that anyway.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  The people are also unique and essential to the fab in a way they aren’t for oil.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    And yet fabs aren't reliant on minerals that are rare and geographically concentrated (for the most part, I'm sure they rely on some rare earths. The point is silicon is hilariously common). Fabs also capture very little value. TSMC and Intel aren't the trillion dollar companies. Google, MS, Amazon, etc. are. So there's really no upside. Only the downside of a large fraction of the world's high end fab capacity disappearing overnight. It'd be one thing if one side of the US and China had their own backup capacity. But they don't. And they won't for at least a decade, in my non-expert opinion.

otikik 5y ago

Most wars are stupid. For some people it doesn't mater how stupid a war is. Only if it's profitable.

gorwell 5y ago

I would bet on the US letting them take it. Like they let the Taliban take Kabul. There's little appetite for starting a new war after Afghanistan, and wouldn't starting a war with China send civilization back to sticks and stones?

antman 5y ago

By the same train of thought, if USA stops the flow of semiconductors towards China, the game theory based proper response would be to bomb them to achieve parity?

mariodiana 5y ago

"U.S. tech firms rely on Taiwanese contract manufacturers to produce up to 90% of their chips […]" https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/13/semiconductor-shortage-us-tech-companies-and-their-reliance-on-taiwan.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/13/semiconductor-shortage-us-te... Okay, the U.S. destroys the Taiwanese fabs to keep them from communist China. Then what?

simplicio 5y ago

Plus while building fab plants is certainly difficult and expensive, its hard to imagine a cost-benefit analysis where fighting a major war is cheaper and easier then just..building your own fab plants.

shoemakersteve 5y ago
The cost-benefit analysis might look pretty decent to an arms manufacturer and their buddies and family members in congress/the senate.
- simplicio 5y ago
  The Senate....of China?

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

Fighting a war to destroy the factories that your strategic opponent depends on could be very smart, though...

gremloni 5y ago

That’s the problem. China will not invade Taiwan explicitly. They will gradually ramp up integration over a decade in small steps that the world will except until it is too late like for Hong Kong.

9999px 5y ago

…if China invaded _their own province_. A province over which their claim is stronger than the US' claim to Hawaii. I keep thinking there's hope to avoid this war, but the way people comment here and on Reddit (in abject ignorance of geopolitical reality), I fear it's inevitable. Fifteen (!) countries support Taiwanese sovereignty. The _rest of the world_ respects China's claim. It's insane that this rhetoric is even present in Americans' minds.

senectus1 5y ago

especially when for spare change a nation state can drop a rock on your factories with little chance of you doing anything about it.