The Three Gorges Dam is the largest target in history. Blow that up and half of China’s population dies. This isn’t the Hoover Dam in the middle of nowhere. The 3GD is upstream from major cities and vital farmand. China would cease to be a country.
If the ChiComs pop a nuke, drop a big, dirty bomb, say 20 megatons, about a mile behind the Three Gorges.
And watch a supersonic wave of highly radioactive live steam literally scour the Yangtze valley of life and industry, and leave it uninhabitable for decades.. .
Easy trigger....China has 1’41 billion with a B.
[Approximately 360 million people live in the Yangtze River basin downstream of the Three Gorges Dam,]
That’s no where near half of China it would be a disaster of epic proportions but not population ending. In fact China plans to loose 600 million in a nuclear war and still exist as a people and viable reproductive group. The Han Chinese plan to lose HALF and still be one of the largest ethically pure groups.
[The Han Chinese population is over 1.4 billion, making it the world’s largest ethnic group. Approximately 1.2 billion live in mainland China, where they constitute about 92% of the population. Significant Han populations also live in Taiwan and Singapore, with smaller communities in other parts of the world. ]
Conventional weapons are useless against a mass of that size, no amounts of WWII bouncing bombs or even 20,000lb bunker busters would struggle to breach it and to do so would be to invite a nuclear strike in retaliation. They could kill 200+ million of us and we would not survive such a counter value attack as a functional population or nation. They designed it to withstand a nuclear strike. No one wants Armageddon so stop with the silly fantasy of nuclear attacks on a nation’s infrastructure. China simply has the demographics to survive a nuclear exchange, the Russians do not but they have built enough fall out shelters for all oftheir major urban populations there is a reason the Moscow subway system is the deepest in the world. They have huge nuclear blast doors on all the surface portals to seal it up as a giant bomb shelter with years of food and water already stocked in side tunnels. Two very different survival strategies, mean will out gov only has bunkers and plans for itself not the citizenry that should tell you everything you need to know about how your government looks at you and your value to it.
This is directly from the engineers who built it.