Officer of Engineers

You're talking about a country who up until recently made the MiG-19 as their dominant fighter while the Soviets were fielding MiG-29s and SU-27s. B-52s would have been beyond their technical capabilities.

The Chinese spent the money on the one area that was relatively cheaper - rockets.

Also, India stores the warheads away from the delivery vehicles also.

And it is a very valid tactic. You double the targets needed to be taken out (the missile and the warhead) and complicating the attacker's targetting procedure. In the case of Pakistan, effectively denying any 1st counterforce strike, without India needing to spend money on a defence system.

Cheap and effective.

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Chimo

Blademaster

For delivering nukes yeah. But in this case, they are not using the rockets for nukes but for conventional bombs so instead of being the cheapest option, now they have become the most expensive option.

That only works when you have a sizeable nuke arsenal. When you don't, a couple hundred rockets can do the job and in this case, China can easily take out India's missiles and the warhead altogether if they know where they are. But if you have 500 rockets and 500 nukes, then it is an effective tactic. Right now India only has about 50 rockets and 100 warheads. That's 150 targets and China has about 600-800 rockets, several times enough to take out India's nukes.

So India has to ramp up the production to 500 nukes and 500 rockets.

Officer of Engineers

You're placing the cart before the horse here. Understand the chronology. The 2AF was initially set up as a nuclear force and procured and operated as one. They found the civilian control of the actual nuclear warheads to be so frustrating that they felt that they could no longer do the mission assigned to them. They saw what tools they have at hand and found that they could still do the mission but with a modified conventional scenario.

But does the Chinese have the confidence that nothing surived? Think about this. NATO-Warsaw Pact assigned 3 nukes to each target in order to ensure its destruction (I'm not well versed enough to tell you why 3 nukes and in what order). So, if I have one nuke and one missile. If I kept them together, I took out 3 Chinese nukes. If I seperated them, I took out 6 Chinese nukes. If I add just one more missile and not another nuke, I took out 9 Chinese nukes. Get it?

Blademaster

This shows how the civilians has basically ruin its effectiveness of the nuke detterent.


Yeah I get it. And even IA can deploy some fake missiles like balloon missiles forcing the Chinese to waste more nukes. That makes sense.