Chinese Missiles
By Budding Sinologist has put together an excellent post on Chinese ballistic missiles and their presumed effect on Taiwanese resistance. Long story short, it is extremely unlikely that China could defeat Taiwan through a ballistic missile attack alone.
Simply put, the combined warhead capacity of 467 CSS-6 and CSS-7 SRBMs (1,100 pounds each) is the equivalent of only 9.5 Vietnam era B-52 sorties (54,000 pounds each). Even if all 700 SRBMs were used and all reached their targets, it would only equal 14 sorties. To look at it another way, the 700 SRBMs would only total 385 tons of high explosives, compared with the hundreds of thousands of tons dropped on Vietnam, for example.
One implication of this is that it makes little sense for Taiwan to spend its defense money on ballistic missile defenses, since the expected return would appear to be minimal.
I do have a couple caveats. First, I’m curious about the hardness of the targets that China would be attacking. It goes to reason that an attack on Taiwan would focus on political, military, and perhaps commercial centers. I would expect that buildings of the first two types will be resistant to high explosive warheads, and thus that damage may be less significant than what the Chinese hope. If the Chinese focus on commercial or symbolic targets they probably need to be a little bit less worried about target resilience, but they’ve also given up just about any hope of victory. Terror bombing never wins wars.
My second question involves the use of ballistic missiles in conjunction with an invasion of Taiwan. My guess is that in the event of an invasion China will focus its ballistic missile resources on the destruction of Taiwanese command and control. I would really like to know how disruptive such an attack might be, but it is, unfortunately, a very hard question to answer.