China up against a horrible kind of US missile

IT is a good thing that World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has resolved to conduct a thorough investigation of the 2019 novel coronavirus acute respiratoty disease (2019nCoV ARD). Pursued to its logical conclusion, the investigation could result in unearthing what could be the real scenario in which the dreaded killer virus is being made to spread in China today.

For emphasis, I am a scenarist, moreover a filmmaker. I am inclined to taking things along cinematic frameworks. Particularly on matters that have to do with people’s lives, I tend to delve in phenomena much deeper than greet the eye, so to speak. It is a cineaste’s intrinsic capacity for rooting out details that are otherwise imperceptible by the ordinary mind.

On the current uproar over the 2019- nCoV, I begin with creating the main character, Direk. It is said in literature that the development of the story is determined by the development of the main character.

Direk first became aware of the coronavirus in 2003. That was when the much-dreaded severe acute respiratory syndrome was deemed a pandemic by medical authorities for afflicting people all over the world. Least relevant to people other than Direk was that it was on January 23 that year when Jose Maria Sison had former New People’s Army chief Rolando Kintanar assassinated. Having earlier equated the Sisonite protracted people’s war with the United States design of perpetuating hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region, Direk saw the assassination as a cog in the wheel of that United States agenda: to frustrate Kintanar’s Sandinista-type city-based uprising for having been conceived to achieve victory over a short period of time. The Kintanar strategy was anathema to Sison’s protracted people’s war. The latter strategy serves the US interest well. What rebellion against it would the US welcome than one that does not have any agenda of winning? That means the US clout in all aspects of Philippine polity stays unperturbed.

The year 2003 was also when the baffling 9/11 attacks caused the crumbling of the Twin Towers in New York like a deck of cards; it killed some 3,000 people, which US President George W. Bush blamed on Muslim terrorists.

Direk observes that when you talk of virus, you inevitably go into such rigmarole as laboratory tests, infusion of chemical cures for virus victims, which, for Direk, is precisely what’s so horrible about the subject matter, because it could involve the mere exigence of letting a killer chemical fly into the air and get masses of humans killed. Otherwise, get swarms of animals, particularly swine, infected with it and then pass on the virus to people.

Just a year after the Twin Tower collapse, Direk was intrigued by the “coalition of the willing.” It was a group formed by Bush for launching a war against Iraq ostensibly aimed at punishing Saddam Hussein for stockpiling chemical weapons of mass destruction.

Only in that event did Direk get to be really conscious of how chemicals can be made to kill humans in great multitudes. The coalition embarked on the Iraq War, subdued the country, capturing Saddam and ultimately executing him. But have they found any chemical weapons in Iraq? Not an ounce of it.

But it permanently ingrained in Direk’s mind the terror of chemical warfare. He was only too aware that in the ongoing nuclear arms race among world powers, the US did it first. America was the first to successfully test the atomic bomb — the first to drop it on humanity. The atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 killed Japanese civilians in the hundreds of thousands — at last causing Japan to surrender and ending World War 2.

But what is the atomic bomb but chemical weaponry? It involves the splitting of atoms — a chemical process called nuclear fission (strict physicists deem it a

process) — of radioactive elements (uranium or plutonium) thereby releasing energy the equivalent of 10,000 tons of TNT.

Now, it has been to the misfortune of the US that although it blasted nuclear weapons first,

Russia eventually overtook it in the race to world nuclear superiority. A US Senate inquiry a year ago had top US war officials admitting that in the event Russia fired its hypersonic missiles at the US, those missiles would be unstoppable, America would be completely defenseless against them.

The only possible way of overcoming the Russian superiority in the nuclear arms race is for the US to be able to fire first. This could be the main reason why the US unilaterally broke away from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Force Treaty, which bans signatories from establishing missile launching bases within a certain limit of territory. With that breakaway, the US is no longer encumbered by the ban and so can fire ballistic missiles at its pleasure.

BUT neither would any firststrike by US place it at an advantage in a war against Russia, because Russian hypersonic missiles would intercept that US attack right at its inception — in US territory.

It would seem that Russian nuclear edge over America is the one single deterrent to explosion of a nuclear Third World War.

Going now to the simmering tension between US and China over the South China Sea, the former must be encountering a similar dilemma. President Donald Trump’s tariff war with China has boomeranged on the US, resulting in a slump in its economy, with both US big business and the consumer community protesting the trade war. For solving this US predicament, war with China seems to be the imperative. If it wins over China in a military confrontation, the US will have a convenient tool for writing off its debt of $ 1 trillion to China.

But China, aside from now challenging US for world economic superiority, has also attained such level of development that makes it superior now to the US even in nuclear armaments.

For one thing, China now is equipped with hypersonic missiles similar to that of Russia, making it capable of intercepting whatever nuclear warheads the US would be firing, whether from Guam or Australia, or if we are to believe former Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines chief Victor Corpus, even from US nuclear submarines that could be lurking in the Manila Trench in the South China Sea.

At the 70th anniversary celebration of the People’s Republic of China at Tiananmen Square last October, China showcased its nuclear arsenal which included, indeed, the hypersonic missile and the DF 31 capable of hitting targets in as far as Homeland America.

So, the US is no longer capable of beating China to the draw in nuclear rivalry. The best it could hope to do is engage the Chinese in conventional warfare, which is precisely what it evidently wants to bring about by increasing tension in the South China Sea. Bear in mind the Scarborough Shoal stand-off, the Philippine arbitration case at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) at the Hague, the agitation for the Philippines to go to war with China in order to push the PCA ruling which is popularly perceived as favoring the Philippines, and the widespread outcry over the accidental ramming by a Chinese vessel of Filipino fishing boat near Recto Reed sometime late last year. All these have been US machinations to get the Philippines into military confrontation with China. Credit China’s superb diplomacy and the effort of the Philippine Chinese community, particularly the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry, which went the extra mile in helping defuse the tension in the Philippines-China sea row, for setting the atmosphere for averting a needless military confrontation.

From all angles of the nuclear arms contest, the US is at an admitted disadvantage and so would not dare prompt China to engage it in that arena. But conventional warfare involving land, sea and air power would be very costly both in terms of men and machine, as the US did experience in such wars it had to run away from as the Vietnam War, the wars against Pakistan and Afghanistan and the Middle East wars.

In its persistent confrontation with China, what could be the overriding question for the US is: how to beat China without a fight?