Jared M. McKinney
In November of 2021, as the world faced semiconductor shortages due to fragile supply chains and just-in-time business practices, a colleague and I proposed an idea intended to reduce the risk of war in the Taiwan Strait: Taiwan should threaten to self-destruct its prized semiconductor machinery in response to a People’s Republic of China (PRC) invasion.[1]
The idea, as originally conceived, was inspired by two sources.
The first source was the longstanding idea of a “Silicon Shield in Taiwan,” which suggested that semiconductors were to Taiwan what oil was to Kuwait: something so important the United States would intervene to see the resource protected.[2] However, by 2021 it was not just the United States that was dependent on Taiwan’s chips, but China too. The problem had become one of interdependence, with Taiwan as the critical node.
The second source was a Chinese novel series, the Three-Body Problem, which introduced the idea of “dark forest” deterrence.[3] The dark forest described a structural condition of hostility among civilizations across the universe. Could understanding this “cosmic sociology” allow Earth to deter an invasion? This was to be done by threatening to reveal the location—to the universe—of both Earth and the Trisolaran home world, which would result in the destruction of both. The trick was: could such a threat be credibly made?
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