--- title: "The Three Gorges Dam: The Most Important Strategic Target in the World" description: "In all the modern world, there is no crisis zone, no flashpoint, and no geopolitical hot spot where the potential for global cataclysm runs quite so high as the triangle of China, America, and Taiwan. Mainland China lays claim to the Republic of China's territory on Taiwan and has made clear its desire to bring Taiwan back by force. Taiwan, sitting out on an island and armed to the teeth, has made clear it would resist, and as soon as hostilities begin, the United States will be right there to take part. If any such war broke out, it would immediately place two militarily powerful nations with immense nuclear stockpiles directly at odds, threatening escalation that could end life as we know it. But China has an Achilles' heel, a critical vulnerability that, if it could credibly be threatened, might be enough to put China's Taiwan aspirations to bed. It is known as the Three Gorges Dam, an incredibly powerful hydroelectric gravity dam that has spent nearly a decade as the most electrically productive power station in the world. It is not just a dam; it is also a time bomb, with over thirty-nine cubic kilometers of water held back behind it and hundreds of millions of people living downstream. Destroy it, and China would experience a wartime disaster that would make the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like child's play.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n- Up to 400 million people live downstream of the Three Gorges Dam, making its destruction potentially the worst man-made catastrophe in human history.\n- The dam contains 28 million cubic meters of concrete and 463,000 metric tons of steel, with a reservoir holding over 39 cubic kilometers of water.\n- During the 2020 Yangtze flooding, the Three Gorges reservoir peak water level came within ten meters of cresting the dam, prompting the evacuation of over 250,000 people in Sichuan Province.\n- Taiwan's Yun Feng cruise missile has a range of 1,200 kilometers, almost exactly the distance from Taipei to the Three Gorges Dam, but likely lacks ordnance capable of rupturing the gravity dam structure.\n- The United States possesses bunker-buster Massive Ordnance Penetrators and Tomahawk cruise missiles with ranges up to 2,500 kilometers that could theoretically threaten the dam.\n- China's PLAAF fields over a thousand fourth-generation fighters, hundreds of fifth-generation J-20s, and more than six hundred long-range surface-to-air missile systems including the S-400 to defend its heartland.\n\n## An Engineering Marvel of Mind-Numbing Scale\n\nThe Three Gorges Dam is one of the most impressive engineering feats of China's entire history, right alongside the historic Great Wall or the modern Tiangong space station. Constructed in several phases over the course of decades, the dam has been complete since 2006 and has been producing electricity at peak capacity since 2012. It sits along the Yangtze River, the longest river in China and the third-longest in the world, behind only the Nile and the Amazon. It is instrumental in preventing floods downriver during the rainy months of the year, it is built to allow oceangoing freighters to pass through a series of locks and continue inland, and it powers millions upon millions of homes and businesses across China. In order to understand just how strategically significant the Three Gorges Dam really is, one must first understand its mind-numbing size. It is 2,335 meters long, or well over a mile at 7,660 feet; its maximum height is 185 meters, 607 feet tall, and its total volume includes 28 million cubic meters of concrete, alongside 463,000 metric tons of steel. Its deepwater reservoir stretches far back upriver, including in the Three Gorges, a series of gorges along the river for which the dam got its name. Its spillway has the ability to handle up to 116,000 cubic meters of water per second, and its total catchment area spans one million square kilometers across China. This structure is not just big; it is big beyond comprehension, and it has major real and symbolic value to the Chinese government. But as much as those facts and figures are genuinely very impressive, all those trivia items do double-duty as a major national security concern. The logic is not particularly hard to follow: the Three Gorges Dam holds back an unbelievable amount of water, which otherwise would be traveling down the rest of the Yangtze River. If that dam were to suddenly stop being a dam, either due to an attack or any other catastrophe, then the dozens of cubic kilometers of water in the dam's reservoir would rush downstream, in a high enough volume that anything, and anyone, in the immediate path is likely to be wiped out.\n\n## Hundreds of Millions Downstream: The Human Cost of Catastrophic Failure\n\nTo get an idea of just how catastrophic the destruction of the Three Gorges Dam would be, one must ask a simple question: who lives downstream from the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River? That would include cities like Yichang, urban population 1.6 million; Jingzhou, urban population 1 million; Wuhan, 12.3 million; Huangshi, 700,000, and more — and that is just in the province where the Three Gorges Dam is located. Further downriver, major cities like Nanjing, urban population 9.3 million; Jiujiang, urban population 2.8 million; or Changzhou, urban population 3.6 million. All in all, up to 400 million people live downstream of the dam, meaning that if the dam were to break, a group of people larger than all but two global nations would be at imminent risk of death. These risks are not a new revelation to the people downstream. Take, for example, the extreme flooding in the upper Yangtze that happened in 2020. In that crisis, heavy rainfall upstream caused a peak inflow of up to 75 million liters of water per second into the Three Gorges reservoir. That crisis prompted officials in China's Sichuan Province to evacuate over a quarter of a million people, while the dam itself was made to discharge 49.2 million liters of water every second, an unbelievable rate of outflow that eclipsed anything else the dam had been expected to handle in the years since it opened. During the crisis, the Chinese government had projected calm around the situation, emphasizing that reservoirs upstream would help the dam resist the flood, but nonetheless, the peak water level at the Three Gorges came within ten meters or less from cresting over the top. That is twenty meters past what is considered warning level. The 2020 flooding was not a one-off issue; the Yangtze River Basin was long known for apocalyptic levels of flooding prior to the dam being built, including a flood in 1931 that killed about 3.7 million people and displaced forty million more. But all this is just to give an idea of what natural catastrophes could do in the Yangtze River Basin. Destruction on that scale, while it would certainly have the potential to be devastating, still cannot remotely compare to what a complete release of the Three Gorges reservoir would mean. A cubic kilometer of water is a quantity that defies comprehension. Against that force, entire neighborhoods of high-rise buildings would be uprooted, bridges and dams downstream would be wiped away, and an unbelievable amount of debris would very quickly saturate the rushing water — meaning that anybody else in its path is not just dealing with a wall of water higher than their city's tallest tower. It is a wall of water filled with shrapnel the size of houses, plus toxic chemicals, flowing at speeds of up to hundreds of kilometers per hour. In cities near the dam, there would likely be little chance of survival at all. In cities located further away, only the lucky would get out alive, as even with hours of time to try and escape, panic and social breakdown could play a major role in preventing people from getting out of the water's path. Adding further devastation, the dam sits on two major fault lines where it is believed to have caused thousands of small earthquakes, and if the reservoir's over forty billion tons of water was suddenly drained, major quakes could rip through the area as well.\n\n## A Target Without Equal: Why No Other Dam Compares\n\nWith such an unbelievable potential for destruction, it should be no surprise that the Three Gorges Dam is not just a prime target, but the prime target for any country that expects it might find itself at war with China. At the top of the shortlist is Taiwan, but South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, and the United States all have their own tensions with China, and a popular sentiment in several of those countries is that they will, one day, end up at war with China as China's global ambitions continue to grow. While those nations are not particularly inclined to talk about any plans to strike the Three Gorges Dam, or their capability to do so, it is the target that is just impossible to miss. And while it may seem that every nation has dams, and while dams have been major military targets in the past — as recently as June of 2023, when Ukraine's Kakhovka Dam was breached and the resulting flood killed at least several dozen people — China is a special circumstance. Take, by example, the Hoover Dam in the United States; it is over 700 feet tall, over 1,200 feet long, and its reservoir, Lake Mead, has a total capacity nearly as big as the Three Gorges reservoir, at 35 cubic kilometers — although the water level at Lake Mead is nowhere near that high currently. But if the Hoover Dam were to be destroyed, there would be no Wuhan-sized city in the floodwaters' path. Instead, the casualties would likely include places like Laughlin, Nevada — population 8,658; Needles, California — population 4,903; and Lake Havasu City, population 57,000. A catastrophic break of the Hoover Dam would sow devastation through those communities, but even without evacuations, the death toll would be a tiny fraction of what China would experience downstream from Three Gorges. Not only that, but the US would have the benefit of evacuating those not-particularly-large townships with hours of advance warning; in China, millions of people who live near to the dam would likely have only minutes to escape the floodwaters. While dams around the world could collapse with horrific results, the sheer scale of devastation that would occur after a Three Gorges collapse is a uniquely Chinese problem.\n\n## Attack and Defense: Offensive Capabilities and the Dam's Resilience\n\nWith the strategic value and the devastating potential of the Three Gorges Dam firmly established, a second question arises: could a nation hostile to China actually destroy the dam, if they wished to do so? Conventional missiles have long been an essential component of Taiwan's ability to deter China from attacking it, using what is called a porcupine strategy of defense. The theory goes that Taiwan would like to make itself unpalatable for invasion, by ensuring that if China attacks Taiwan, China will have to deal with massive retaliation and massive casualties as punishment — even if Taiwan still loses in the end. In that strategic sense, the Three Gorges Dam is perhaps the best thing for Taiwan to attempt to target. In exchange for invading an island and conquering less than 24 million people, China gets to absorb incredible casualties, at a number potentially greater than Taiwan's entire population. If Taiwan did want to launch that attack, they would have to do it with one of the missiles in their arsenal. While that arsenal may not entirely be a matter of public record, it is known that they have some serious kit on hand — and specifically, a land-attack cruise missile currently in operation called the Yun Feng. Although the size of Taiwan's total Yun Feng arsenal is unknown, Taiwan is believed to have at least a few dozen of the missiles, if not more. They utilize ramjet engines, enabling travel at speeds of over a kilometer per second, and they can carry semi-armor-piercing explosive warheads. The standard range of a Yun Feng missile is 1,200 kilometers — almost exactly the distance from the Taiwanese capital city of Taipei to the Three Gorges Dam — although an extended-range version currently in development is believed to be capable of traveling up to two thousand kilometers. Taiwan also has well over 100 American-made F-16s, and nearly 200 older-model American F-5 and French Mirage 2000 jets — all of which could conceivably fill an attack role, and all of which could conceivably make it all the way to the Three Gorges Dam from Taiwan, if they do not expect to make it home. Then there is China's other most likely adversary, the United States. Where land-attack missiles are concerned, the big one for China to worry about is the Tomahawk, which can be launched from ships, submarines, or land, travel a range of between 1,250 and 2,500 kilometers, and be launched in the dozens for even minor attacks, let alone the hundreds the US would likely be willing to expend in a major war. For perspective, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer can carry over 90 Tomahawk missiles on board. Also in the American arsenal are new hypersonic missiles like the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, expected to already be in Army service and soon coming to the Navy, and other high-powered conventional weapons. And then there is the United States Air Force. Strategic bombers like the B-2 Spirit, the B-1B Lancer, and the B-52 Stratofortress are each more than capable of performing overflights of the entire Chinese mainland, taking off from one US base and landing at another halfway around the world. While they fly over, they would be capable of dropping conventional weapons like the bunker-buster Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, which is designed to be able to destroy WMDs buried underground in reinforced bunkers. They would also be able to call upon the C-130 Hercules, a long-range strategic airlifter that could also perform overflights of the Chinese mainland, while dropping the so-called Mother of All Bombs, a nearly 10,000-kilogram bomb with a blast yield equivalent to 11 tons of TNT. Those American strategic bombers will be joined, in a few years, by the B-21 Raider, and they will be protected by legions of fifth-generation F-35 fighters, sipping on refills from strategic tanker aircraft that would make them more than capable of staying with their bombers for the entirety of a massive bombing run.\n\n## Passive Defenses and China's Formidable Air Shield\n\nEven before considering any active defense measures China might have in place, there are things about the Three Gorges Dam itself that help to make it impervious to attack. In particular, it is what is known as a gravity dam — that is to say, a dam that resists the outward pressure of water simply with its own weight. If the Hoover Dam were taken out with an explosion at the base, all the concrete above the base would fall downward, way below the water level of Lake Mead, and the collapsed structure would not be able to hold back hardly anything. The Three Gorges, though, is a much larger monolith, made of reinforced concrete that is just sitting in a big, man-made mountain. It is also thirty meters taller than the typical water level in its reservoir, meaning that even if some of the top parts of the dam were to be blasted away, there would still be plenty of structure left over above the surface of the water. Obviously, flood conditions on the Yangtze would change this balance significantly, but that is almost certainly something that Chinese military planners would be aware of, making it highly unlikely that China would choose to begin a war if the reservoir levels were so high that a few well-placed bombs could bring the whole dam down. What this means is that any missile or air attack on the dam would have to use specific types of ordnance that do not just damage its outer face, but cause blasts that would rupture the wall of the dam itself, either by using a really huge explosive, or using ones that can burrow into reinforced concrete before exploding. That is ordnance that the United States has, but Taiwan does not. People both in and out of Taiwan with an incentive to make China nervous about the Three Gorges Dam will dispute that claim, but there is little indicator that anything in Taiwan's arsenal would be able to create a catastrophic rupture. Then there is the question of China's active defenses, which, considering that an attack would strike deep in China's own heartland, would certainly be tough to overcome. Not only is the Three Gorges Dam insulated by a range of military bases on China's own territory, but any manned air attack would have to deal with the People's Liberation Army Air Force. At its disposal, the PLAAF has over a thousand fourth-generation fighters, including the Su-27, the Su-30, the J-10, the J-11, the Su-35, and the J-16, as well as a couple hundred fifth-generation Chengdu J-20 fighters. They have also got well over six hundred long-range surface-to-air missile systems, and hundreds more at medium and short range, including dozens of the vaunted Russian-made S-400 system. All these defenses and more would also apply to missile defense, making the sky over China one of the most utterly impenetrable no-fly zones in the entire world.\n\n## Deterrence in Two Directions: Why the Dam Keeps the Peace\n\nThe balance of power over China's skies could be disrupted during major war. A massive flyover of the Chinese mainland by American air power and its global partners would, at the very least, cause major problems for China around the Three Gorges Dam, and the right ordnance, launched at the right targets in the right way and at the right frequency, could conceivably bring it down. But that is a difficult needle to thread, and even more difficult if such a strike had to be carried out by Taiwan alone with its missiles, or by surprise at the outset of a new conflict. The point of strategic deterrence is the practice of dissuading a potentially hostile nation from launching an attack because of the potential costs to themselves. But strategic deterrence does not work unless a nation that wants to defend itself makes sure that its potential enemy has zero illusions about what they could do to them. That is why most nuclear-armed nations have no issue disclosing the world-ending numbers of nuclear weapons they have in their arsenal, and it is why major strategic military advancements, like next-generation fighter jets or naval ships, get announced to the world instead of being kept secret until deployed into battle. So, the risk of a destroyed Three Gorges Dam is certainly a deterrent to China, but a brief look at Taiwan's known arsenal will quickly establish that Taiwan is not the nation to pose that specific deterrent threat. Instead, the deterrent value is to prevent China from willfully entering into a global conflict, probably involving the US, in which nations that consider Taiwan an ally would be willing to use their own, deadlier weapons against the Three Gorges Dam. Taiwan's own strategic porcupine doctrine would suggest that if they did have anything in their arsenal that could bring down the dam, they would be tripping over themselves to tell the world, and thus tell China, but that has not happened. The Three Gorges Dam may be the world's biggest strategic target, but it is not a target Taiwan is likely to bring down. The destruction of the Three Gorges Dam would be a double-edged sword for a highly globalized economy. It is a decision that could come back to bite Taiwan, the US, and the rest of the world in a major way. On the one hand, there is the argument of human cost; the dam's destruction would immediately make the nation that destroyed it culpable for human devastation on the scale of the Black Plague or the entire Second World War. That would be the biggest single, intentional act of human destruction ever, by an order of magnitude. But beyond that, a flood of that size would cripple global trade, straight-up erase a large proportion of the world's food supply, and destroy a part of the world that is vital for global finance, manufacturing, and scientific innovation. All of that, gone in the span of just a few hours, creating global catastrophes that would take years, if not decades, to solve. Extending that logic outward, it is not inconceivable to argue that destruction of the Three Gorges Dam is a hypothetical deterrent in two directions at once. If China fears that Taiwan or the United States could destroy the dam as retaliation if a war breaks out, then China is incentivized to do what it can to prevent that war from breaking out in the first place, or otherwise drawing down hostilities if war does start, instead of escalating upward. But if Taiwan, the US, and other potential participants understand that a war would likely mean the dam's destruction, then they, too, are disincentivized from starting that war, because of the havoc that the dam's destruction would wreak all across the world. Finally, if the dam really was destroyed, this would likely be taken by China as an act equal to, if not greater than, the use of a nuclear weapon — meaning that, from China's perspective, the use of nuclear weapons may be seen as an appropriate retaliatory measure. That means escalation reaches the nuclear apocalypse stage regardless, meaning that the US and China might as well have skipped the whole dam issue and gotten right to the conclusion.\n\n## Mutually Assured Destruction by Another Name\n\nThe Three Gorges Dam is, without a doubt, the biggest strategic target in the world, and just as its defense is absolutely imperative for China, its destruction is likely to be the highest priority for any nation who finds itself as China's wartime adversary. But with a target of this sheer size that is so close to indestructible, the magnitude of devastation that would result, if it were destroyed, is enough that the mere thought of the dam breaking would make anybody sue for peace. It is a cycle that played out between the Americans and the Soviets during the Cold War; any direct conflict leads to the potential use of nuclear weapons, and the use of nuclear weapons would be so catastrophic that it would be practically unthinkable to start a conflict. Now, in a faceoff between mainland China, Taiwan, and its global allies where nuclear weapons already feature on both sides, the Three Gorges Dam is a second form of mutually assured destruction. Bring it down, and everybody loses, in what would be the worst man-made catastrophe in human history. That is geopolitics at its starkest: sometimes, the solemn promise of mutually assured destruction is all there is. But then again, it has worked so far. It has worked for a very long time.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### Why is the Three Gorges Dam considered the world's most important strategic target?\n\nUp to 400 million people live downstream of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, meaning its destruction would immediately threaten a population larger than all but two nations on Earth. In a war with China, destroying the dam would inflict catastrophic civilian losses, making it the highest-priority offensive target for any nation expecting conflict with China, while China's imperative to defend it shapes its entire defense posture.\n\n### Could Taiwan's missiles actually destroy the Three Gorges Dam?\n\nProbably not. Taiwan's Yun Feng cruise missile has a range of roughly 1,200 kilometers — almost exactly the distance from Taipei to the dam — but it likely lacks ordnance capable of rupturing a gravity dam of that scale. The dam is a massive monolith of reinforced concrete 185 meters tall and 2,335 meters long, and destroying it requires deep-penetrating munitions like the United States' Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which Taiwan does not possess.\n\n### How close did the Three Gorges Dam come to failure during the 2020 Yangtze floods?\n\nDuring the extreme 2020 flooding, heavy rainfall upstream sent a peak inflow of up to 75 million liters of water per second into the Three Gorges reservoir. The dam discharged 49.2 million liters per second — more than it had ever been expected to handle — and the peak water level came within ten meters of cresting the top of the dam, which was twenty meters past the official warning level. Chinese authorities evacuated over 250,000 people in Sichuan Province.\n\n### What defensive capabilities protect the Three Gorges Dam from attack?\n\nChina's People's Liberation Army Air Force fields over a thousand fourth-generation fighters, hundreds of fifth-generation J-20s, and more than six hundred long-range surface-to-air missile systems, including the Russian-made S-400, making the airspace over China's heartland one of the most heavily defended in the world. The dam itself is a gravity dam — a reinforced concrete monolith that resists pressure through sheer mass — making it far harder to rupture than arch or embankment dams.\n\n### How does the Three Gorges Dam function as a form of mutual deterrence?\n\nThe dam deters China from entering a major war because an adversary like the United States could credibly threaten its destruction, while simultaneously deterring Taiwan and the US because destroying the dam would kill hundreds of millions of civilians, cripple global trade, erase a large share of the world's food supply, and likely trigger Chinese nuclear retaliation. This makes the dam a second layer of mutually assured destruction — alongside nuclear weapons — that makes any full-scale war between China and the United States practically unthinkable.\n\n## Related Coverage\n- [When the Red Button Falls: The Unraveling After a Global Nuclear War](https://warfronts-prod.fulcrum-labs.workers.dev/conflicts/when-red-button-falls-unraveling-global-nuclear-war)\n- [Sudan's Forgotten War: Why the World Looks Away](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/sudans-forgotten-war)\n- [Why is America Destroying its Strongest Alliances? And More.](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/why-is-america-destroying-its-strongest-alliances-and-more)\n- [Japan's Nuclear Crossroads: Pacifism, Deterrence, and Regional Threat](https://warfronts-prod.fulcrum-labs.workers.dev/geopolitics/japan-nuclear-crossroads-pacifism-deterrence-regional-threat)\n- [America's New Fighter Jet, China's Invasion Ships, and More.](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/americas-new-fighter-jet-chinas-invasion-ships-and-more)\n\n## Sources\n1. \n2. \n3. \n4. \n5. \n6. \n7. \n8. \n9. \n10. \n11. \n12. \n13. \n14. \n15. \n16. \n17. \n18. \n19. \n20. \n21. \n22. \n\n[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/20/china-three-gorges-dam-highest-level-hydro-electric-floods\n[2]: https://www.britannica.com/science/Yangtze-River-floods\n[3]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/three-gorges-dam-china-floods-evacuations-deaths-leshan-giant-buddha-unesco-site/\n[4]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/8/21/water-inside-chinas-three-gorges-dam-nears-maximum-levels\n[5]: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147013/yangtze-dams-spill-water\n[6]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Natural-disasters/As-water-crests-Three-Gorges-Dam-crisis-puts-400m-at-risk#:~:text=But%20if%20it%20did%20burst,400%20million%20people%20living%20downstream\n[7]: https://www.grunge.com/463664/heres-what-would-happen-if-the-three-gorges-dam-broke/\n[8]: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-risks-of-chinas-three-gorges-dams-flooding/\n[9]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-three-gorges-dam-disaster/\n[10]: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Three-Gorges-Dam/History-and-controversy-of-the-Three-Gorges-Dam\n[11]: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/china-three-gorges-dam-intl-hnk-dst/index.html\n[12]: https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/yun-feng/\n[13]: https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/tomahawk/\n[14]: https://central.asia-news.com/en_GB/articles/cnmi_ca/features/2023/04/09/feature-03#:~:text=Arleigh%20Burke%2Dclass%20destroyers%20can,missiles%20for%20ballistic%20missile%20defence\n[15]: https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/06/a-look-at-the-sizes-of-u-s-land-based-strike-missiles/\n[16]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11991\n[17]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/gravity-dam#:~:text=A%20gravity%20dam%20is%20a,with%20seals%20at%20the%20joints\n[18]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0734743X1930795X\n[19]: https://www.businessinsider.com/new-pentagon-maps-show-the-chinese-military-growing-reach-2022-3\n[20]: https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104614/massive-ordnance-penetrator/\n[21]: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/our-best-look-yet-at-the-massive-ordnance-penetrator-bunker-buster-bomb\n[22]: https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2001732840/\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/three-gorges-dam-most-important-strategic-target-world.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/three-gorges-dam-most-important-strategic-target-world datePublished: 2026-03-04 dateModified: 2026-03-04 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/7oLikHJogqQ/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 9e6aa216ab225d85094955720a2b38df29fb26155b16f869c8bd9e025f38d72b tokens: 7718 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/three-gorges-dam-most-important-strategic-target-world.md.summary.md --- In all the modern world, there is no crisis zone, no flashpoint, and no geopolitical hot spot where the potential for global cataclysm runs quite so high as the triangle of China, America, and Taiwan. Mainland China lays claim to the Republic of China's territory on Taiwan and has made clear its desire to bring Taiwan back by force. Taiwan, sitting out on an island and armed to the teeth, has made clear it would resist, and as soon as hostilities begin, the United States will be right there to take part. If any such war broke out, it would immediately place two militarily powerful nations with immense nuclear stockpiles directly at odds, threatening escalation that could end life as we know it. But China has an Achilles' heel, a critical vulnerability that, if it could credibly be threatened, might be enough to put China's Taiwan aspirations to bed. It is known as the Three Gorges Dam, an incredibly powerful hydroelectric gravity dam that has spent nearly a decade as the most electrically productive power station in the world. It is not just a dam; it is also a time bomb, with over thirty-nine cubic kilometers of water held back behind it and hundreds of millions of people living downstream. Destroy it, and China would experience a wartime disaster that would make the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like child's play. ## Key Takeaways - Up to 400 million people live downstream of the Three Gorges Dam, making its destruction potentially the worst man-made catastrophe in human history. - The dam contains 28 million cubic meters of concrete and 463,000 metric tons of steel, with a reservoir holding over 39 cubic kilometers of water. - During the 2020 Yangtze flooding, the Three Gorges reservoir peak water level came within ten meters of cresting the dam, prompting the evacuation of over 250,000 people in Sichuan Province. - Taiwan's Yun Feng cruise missile has a range of 1,200 kilometers, almost exactly the distance from Taipei to the Three Gorges Dam, but likely lacks ordnance capable of rupturing the gravity dam structure. - The United States possesses bunker-buster Massive Ordnance Penetrators and Tomahawk cruise missiles with ranges up to 2,500 kilometers that could theoretically threaten the dam. - China's PLAAF fields over a thousand fourth-generation fighters, hundreds of fifth-generation J-20s, and more than six hundred long-range surface-to-air missile systems including the S-400 to defend its heartland. ## An Engineering Marvel of Mind-Numbing Scale The Three Gorges Dam is one of the most impressive engineering feats of China's entire history, right alongside the historic Great Wall or the modern Tiangong space station. Constructed in several phases over the course of decades, the dam has been complete since 2006 and has been producing electricity at peak capacity since 2012. It sits along the Yangtze River, the longest river in China and the third-longest in the world, behind only the Nile and the Amazon. It is instrumental in preventing floods downriver during the rainy months of the year, it is built to allow oceangoing freighters to pass through a series of locks and continue inland, and it powers millions upon millions of homes and businesses across China. In order to understand just how strategically significant the Three Gorges Dam really is, one must first understand its mind-numbing size. It is 2,335 meters long, or well over a mile at 7,660 feet; its maximum height is 185 meters, 607 feet tall, and its total volume includes 28 million cubic meters of concrete, alongside 463,000 metric tons of steel. Its deepwater reservoir stretches far back upriver, including in the Three Gorges, a series of gorges along the river for which the dam got its name. Its spillway has the ability to handle up to 116,000 cubic meters of water per second, and its total catchment area spans one million square kilometers across China. This structure is not just big; it is big beyond comprehension, and it has major real and symbolic value to the Chinese government. But as much as those facts and figures are genuinely very impressive, all those trivia items do double-duty as a major national security concern. The logic is not particularly hard to follow: the Three Gorges Dam holds back an unbelievable amount of water, which otherwise would be traveling down the rest of the Yangtze River. If that dam were to suddenly stop being a dam, either due to an attack or any other catastrophe, then the dozens of cubic kilometers of water in the dam's reservoir would rush downstream, in a high enough volume that anything, and anyone, in the immediate path is likely to be wiped out. ## Hundreds of Millions Downstream: The Human Cost of Catastrophic Failure To get an idea of just how catastrophic the destruction of the Three Gorges Dam would be, one must ask a simple question: who lives downstream from the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River? That would include cities like Yichang, urban population 1.6 million; Jingzhou, urban population 1 million; Wuhan, 12.3 million; Huangshi, 700,000, and more — and that is just in the province where the Three Gorges Dam is located. Further downriver, major cities like Nanjing, urban population 9.3 million; Jiujiang, urban population 2.8 million; or Changzhou, urban population 3.6 million. All in all, up to 400 million people live downstream of the dam, meaning that if the dam were to break, a group of people larger than all but two global nations would be at imminent risk of death. These risks are not a new revelation to the people downstream. Take, for example, the extreme flooding in the upper Yangtze that happened in 2020. In that crisis, heavy rainfall upstream caused a peak inflow of up to 75 million liters of water per second into the Three Gorges reservoir. That crisis prompted officials in China's Sichuan Province to evacuate over a quarter of a million people, while the dam itself was made to discharge 49.2 million liters of water every second, an unbelievable rate of outflow that eclipsed anything else the dam had been expected to handle in the years since it opened. During the crisis, the Chinese government had projected calm around the situation, emphasizing that reservoirs upstream would help the dam resist the flood, but nonetheless, the peak water level at the Three Gorges came within ten meters or less from cresting over the top. That is twenty meters past what is considered warning level. The 2020 flooding was not a one-off issue; the Yangtze River Basin was long known for apocalyptic levels of flooding prior to the dam being built, including a flood in 1931 that killed about 3.7 million people and displaced forty million more. But all this is just to give an idea of what natural catastrophes could do in the Yangtze River Basin. Destruction on that scale, while it would certainly have the potential to be devastating, still cannot remotely compare to what a complete release of the Three Gorges reservoir would mean. A cubic kilometer of water is a quantity that defies comprehension. Against that force, entire neighborhoods of high-rise buildings would be uprooted, bridges and dams downstream would be wiped away, and an unbelievable amount of debris would very quickly saturate the rushing water — meaning that anybody else in its path is not just dealing with a wall of water higher than their city's tallest tower. It is a wall of water filled with shrapnel the size of houses, plus toxic chemicals, flowing at speeds of up to hundreds of kilometers per hour. In cities near the dam, there would likely be little chance of survival at all. In cities located further away, only the lucky would get out alive, as even with hours of time to try and escape, panic and social breakdown could play a major role in preventing people from getting out of the water's path. Adding further devastation, the dam sits on two major fault lines where it is believed to have caused thousands of small earthquakes, and if the reservoir's over forty billion tons of water was suddenly drained, major quakes could rip through the area as well. ## A Target Without Equal: Why No Other Dam Compares With such an unbelievable potential for destruction, it should be no surprise that the Three Gorges Dam is not just a prime target, but the prime target for any country that expects it might find itself at war with China. At the top of the shortlist is Taiwan, but South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, and the United States all have their own tensions with China, and a popular sentiment in several of those countries is that they will, one day, end up at war with China as China's global ambitions continue to grow. While those nations are not particularly inclined to talk about any plans to strike the Three Gorges Dam, or their capability to do so, it is the target that is just impossible to miss. And while it may seem that every nation has dams, and while dams have been major military targets in the past — as recently as June of 2023, when Ukraine's Kakhovka Dam was breached and the resulting flood killed at least several dozen people — China is a special circumstance. Take, by example, the Hoover Dam in the United States; it is over 700 feet tall, over 1,200 feet long, and its reservoir, Lake Mead, has a total capacity nearly as big as the Three Gorges reservoir, at 35 cubic kilometers — although the water level at Lake Mead is nowhere near that high currently. But if the Hoover Dam were to be destroyed, there would be no Wuhan-sized city in the floodwaters' path. Instead, the casualties would likely include places like Laughlin, Nevada — population 8,658; Needles, California — population 4,903; and Lake Havasu City, population 57,000. A catastrophic break of the Hoover Dam would sow devastation through those communities, but even without evacuations, the death toll would be a tiny fraction of what China would experience downstream from Three Gorges. Not only that, but the US would have the benefit of evacuating those not-particularly-large townships with hours of advance warning; in China, millions of people who live near to the dam would likely have only minutes to escape the floodwaters. While dams around the world could collapse with horrific results, the sheer scale of devastation that would occur after a Three Gorges collapse is a uniquely Chinese problem. ## Attack and Defense: Offensive Capabilities and the Dam's Resilience With the strategic value and the devastating potential of the Three Gorges Dam firmly established, a second question arises: could a nation hostile to China actually destroy the dam, if they wished to do so? Conventional missiles have long been an essential component of Taiwan's ability to deter China from attacking it, using what is called a porcupine strategy of defense. The theory goes that Taiwan would like to make itself unpalatable for invasion, by ensuring that if China attacks Taiwan, China will have to deal with massive retaliation and massive casualties as punishment — even if Taiwan still loses in the end. In that strategic sense, the Three Gorges Dam is perhaps the best thing for Taiwan to attempt to target. In exchange for invading an island and conquering less than 24 million people, China gets to absorb incredible casualties, at a number potentially greater than Taiwan's entire population. If Taiwan did want to launch that attack, they would have to do it with one of the missiles in their arsenal. While that arsenal may not entirely be a matter of public record, it is known that they have some serious kit on hand — and specifically, a land-attack cruise missile currently in operation called the Yun Feng. Although the size of Taiwan's total Yun Feng arsenal is unknown, Taiwan is believed to have at least a few dozen of the missiles, if not more. They utilize ramjet engines, enabling travel at speeds of over a kilometer per second, and they can carry semi-armor-piercing explosive warheads. The standard range of a Yun Feng missile is 1,200 kilometers — almost exactly the distance from the Taiwanese capital city of Taipei to the Three Gorges Dam — although an extended-range version currently in development is believed to be capable of traveling up to two thousand kilometers. Taiwan also has well over 100 American-made F-16s, and nearly 200 older-model American F-5 and French Mirage 2000 jets — all of which could conceivably fill an attack role, and all of which could conceivably make it all the way to the Three Gorges Dam from Taiwan, if they do not expect to make it home. Then there is China's other most likely adversary, the United States. Where land-attack missiles are concerned, the big one for China to worry about is the Tomahawk, which can be launched from ships, submarines, or land, travel a range of between 1,250 and 2,500 kilometers, and be launched in the dozens for even minor attacks, let alone the hundreds the US would likely be willing to expend in a major war. For perspective, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer can carry over 90 Tomahawk missiles on board. Also in the American arsenal are new hypersonic missiles like the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, expected to already be in Army service and soon coming to the Navy, and other high-powered conventional weapons. And then there is the United States Air Force. Strategic bombers like the B-2 Spirit, the B-1B Lancer, and the B-52 Stratofortress are each more than capable of performing overflights of the entire Chinese mainland, taking off from one US base and landing at another halfway around the world. While they fly over, they would be capable of dropping conventional weapons like the bunker-buster Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, which is designed to be able to destroy WMDs buried underground in reinforced bunkers. They would also be able to call upon the C-130 Hercules, a long-range strategic airlifter that could also perform overflights of the Chinese mainland, while dropping the so-called Mother of All Bombs, a nearly 10,000-kilogram bomb with a blast yield equivalent to 11 tons of TNT. Those American strategic bombers will be joined, in a few years, by the B-21 Raider, and they will be protected by legions of fifth-generation F-35 fighters, sipping on refills from strategic tanker aircraft that would make them more than capable of staying with their bombers for the entirety of a massive bombing run. ## Passive Defenses and China's Formidable Air Shield Even before considering any active defense measures China might have in place, there are things about the Three Gorges Dam itself that help to make it impervious to attack. In particular, it is what is known as a gravity dam — that is to say, a dam that resists the outward pressure of water simply with its own weight. If the Hoover Dam were taken out with an explosion at the base, all the concrete above the base would fall downward, way below the water level of Lake Mead, and the collapsed structure would not be able to hold back hardly anything. The Three Gorges, though, is a much larger monolith, made of reinforced concrete that is just sitting in a big, man-made mountain. It is also thirty meters taller than the typical water level in its reservoir, meaning that even if some of the top parts of the dam were to be blasted away, there would still be plenty of structure left over above the surface of the water. Obviously, flood conditions on the Yangtze would change this balance significantly, but that is almost certainly something that Chinese military planners would be aware of, making it highly unlikely that China would choose to begin a war if the reservoir levels were so high that a few well-placed bombs could bring the whole dam down. What this means is that any missile or air attack on the dam would have to use specific types of ordnance that do not just damage its outer face, but cause blasts that would rupture the wall of the dam itself, either by using a really huge explosive, or using ones that can burrow into reinforced concrete before exploding. That is ordnance that the United States has, but Taiwan does not. People both in and out of Taiwan with an incentive to make China nervous about the Three Gorges Dam will dispute that claim, but there is little indicator that anything in Taiwan's arsenal would be able to create a catastrophic rupture. Then there is the question of China's active defenses, which, considering that an attack would strike deep in China's own heartland, would certainly be tough to overcome. Not only is the Three Gorges Dam insulated by a range of military bases on China's own territory, but any manned air attack would have to deal with the People's Liberation Army Air Force. At its disposal, the PLAAF has over a thousand fourth-generation fighters, including the Su-27, the Su-30, the J-10, the J-11, the Su-35, and the J-16, as well as a couple hundred fifth-generation Chengdu J-20 fighters. They have also got well over six hundred long-range surface-to-air missile systems, and hundreds more at medium and short range, including dozens of the vaunted Russian-made S-400 system. All these defenses and more would also apply to missile defense, making the sky over China one of the most utterly impenetrable no-fly zones in the entire world. ## Deterrence in Two Directions: Why the Dam Keeps the Peace The balance of power over China's skies could be disrupted during major war. A massive flyover of the Chinese mainland by American air power and its global partners would, at the very least, cause major problems for China around the Three Gorges Dam, and the right ordnance, launched at the right targets in the right way and at the right frequency, could conceivably bring it down. But that is a difficult needle to thread, and even more difficult if such a strike had to be carried out by Taiwan alone with its missiles, or by surprise at the outset of a new conflict. The point of strategic deterrence is the practice of dissuading a potentially hostile nation from launching an attack because of the potential costs to themselves. But strategic deterrence does not work unless a nation that wants to defend itself makes sure that its potential enemy has zero illusions about what they could do to them. That is why most nuclear-armed nations have no issue disclosing the world-ending numbers of nuclear weapons they have in their arsenal, and it is why major strategic military advancements, like next-generation fighter jets or naval ships, get announced to the world instead of being kept secret until deployed into battle. So, the risk of a destroyed Three Gorges Dam is certainly a deterrent to China, but a brief look at Taiwan's known arsenal will quickly establish that Taiwan is not the nation to pose that specific deterrent threat. Instead, the deterrent value is to prevent China from willfully entering into a global conflict, probably involving the US, in which nations that consider Taiwan an ally would be willing to use their own, deadlier weapons against the Three Gorges Dam. Taiwan's own strategic porcupine doctrine would suggest that if they did have anything in their arsenal that could bring down the dam, they would be tripping over themselves to tell the world, and thus tell China, but that has not happened. The Three Gorges Dam may be the world's biggest strategic target, but it is not a target Taiwan is likely to bring down. The destruction of the Three Gorges Dam would be a double-edged sword for a highly globalized economy. It is a decision that could come back to bite Taiwan, the US, and the rest of the world in a major way. On the one hand, there is the argument of human cost; the dam's destruction would immediately make the nation that destroyed it culpable for human devastation on the scale of the Black Plague or the entire Second World War. That would be the biggest single, intentional act of human destruction ever, by an order of magnitude. But beyond that, a flood of that size would cripple global trade, straight-up erase a large proportion of the world's food supply, and destroy a part of the world that is vital for global finance, manufacturing, and scientific innovation. All of that, gone in the span of just a few hours, creating global catastrophes that would take years, if not decades, to solve. Extending that logic outward, it is not inconceivable to argue that destruction of the Three Gorges Dam is a hypothetical deterrent in two directions at once. If China fears that Taiwan or the United States could destroy the dam as retaliation if a war breaks out, then China is incentivized to do what it can to prevent that war from breaking out in the first place, or otherwise drawing down hostilities if war does start, instead of escalating upward. But if Taiwan, the US, and other potential participants understand that a war would likely mean the dam's destruction, then they, too, are disincentivized from starting that war, because of the havoc that the dam's destruction would wreak all across the world. Finally, if the dam really was destroyed, this would likely be taken by China as an act equal to, if not greater than, the use of a nuclear weapon — meaning that, from China's perspective, the use of nuclear weapons may be seen as an appropriate retaliatory measure. That means escalation reaches the nuclear apocalypse stage regardless, meaning that the US and China might as well have skipped the whole dam issue and gotten right to the conclusion. ## Mutually Assured Destruction by Another Name The Three Gorges Dam is, without a doubt, the biggest strategic target in the world, and just as its defense is absolutely imperative for China, its destruction is likely to be the highest priority for any nation who finds itself as China's wartime adversary. But with a target of this sheer size that is so close to indestructible, the magnitude of devastation that would result, if it were destroyed, is enough that the mere thought of the dam breaking would make anybody sue for peace. It is a cycle that played out between the Americans and the Soviets during the Cold War; any direct conflict leads to the potential use of nuclear weapons, and the use of nuclear weapons would be so catastrophic that it would be practically unthinkable to start a conflict. Now, in a faceoff between mainland China, Taiwan, and its global allies where nuclear weapons already feature on both sides, the Three Gorges Dam is a second form of mutually assured destruction. Bring it down, and everybody loses, in what would be the worst man-made catastrophe in human history. That is geopolitics at its starkest: sometimes, the solemn promise of mutually assured destruction is all there is. But then again, it has worked so far. It has worked for a very long time. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Why is the Three Gorges Dam considered the world's most important strategic target? Up to 400 million people live downstream of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, meaning its destruction would immediately threaten a population larger than all but two nations on Earth. In a war with China, destroying the dam would inflict catastrophic civilian losses, making it the highest-priority offensive target for any nation expecting conflict with China, while China's imperative to defend it shapes its entire defense posture. ### Could Taiwan's missiles actually destroy the Three Gorges Dam? Probably not. Taiwan's Yun Feng cruise missile has a range of roughly 1,200 kilometers — almost exactly the distance from Taipei to the dam — but it likely lacks ordnance capable of rupturing a gravity dam of that scale. The dam is a massive monolith of reinforced concrete 185 meters tall and 2,335 meters long, and destroying it requires deep-penetrating munitions like the United States' Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which Taiwan does not possess. ### How close did the Three Gorges Dam come to failure during the 2020 Yangtze floods? During the extreme 2020 flooding, heavy rainfall upstream sent a peak inflow of up to 75 million liters of water per second into the Three Gorges reservoir. The dam discharged 49.2 million liters per second — more than it had ever been expected to handle — and the peak water level came within ten meters of cresting the top of the dam, which was twenty meters past the official warning level. Chinese authorities evacuated over 250,000 people in Sichuan Province. ### What defensive capabilities protect the Three Gorges Dam from attack? China's People's Liberation Army Air Force fields over a thousand fourth-generation fighters, hundreds of fifth-generation J-20s, and more than six hundred long-range surface-to-air missile systems, including the Russian-made S-400, making the airspace over China's heartland one of the most heavily defended in the world. The dam itself is a gravity dam — a reinforced concrete monolith that resists pressure through sheer mass — making it far harder to rupture than arch or embankment dams. ### How does the Three Gorges Dam function as a form of mutual deterrence? The dam deters China from entering a major war because an adversary like the United States could credibly threaten its destruction, while simultaneously deterring Taiwan and the US because destroying the dam would kill hundreds of millions of civilians, cripple global trade, erase a large share of the world's food supply, and likely trigger Chinese nuclear retaliation. This makes the dam a second layer of mutually assured destruction — alongside nuclear weapons — that makes any full-scale war between China and the United States practically unthinkable. ## Related Coverage - [When the Red Button Falls: The Unraveling After a Global Nuclear War](https://warfronts-prod.fulcrum-labs.workers.dev/conflicts/when-red-button-falls-unraveling-global-nuclear-war) - [Sudan's Forgotten War: Why the World Looks Away](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/sudans-forgotten-war) - [Why is America Destroying its Strongest Alliances? And More.](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/why-is-america-destroying-its-strongest-alliances-and-more) - [Japan's Nuclear Crossroads: Pacifism, Deterrence, and Regional Threat](https://warfronts-prod.fulcrum-labs.workers.dev/geopolitics/japan-nuclear-crossroads-pacifism-deterrence-regional-threat) - [America's New Fighter Jet, China's Invasion Ships, and More.](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/americas-new-fighter-jet-chinas-invasion-ships-and-more) ## Sources 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 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