If war breaks out and the enemy bombs the Three Gorges Dam with a nuclear bomb, what consequences will China face?

2026-08-11 19:17 HKT (excerpts)

For many years, there have been constant voices in society about what would happen if China's super projects suffered serious disasters, especially China's Three Gorges Dam, which is the top priority in the public opinion field.

Taiwan military expert Su Ziyun once said that "two missiles can bomb the Three Gorges Dam", which instantly caused an uproar. What is even more disturbing is that the United States has also proposed aiming at the Three Gorges Dam.

So, what consequences will we face if the Three Gorges Dam is bombed? How feasible is this plan?

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So the United States, which regards us as an adversary, has put forward proposals and made feasibility predictions. Taiwanese politicians have also made assumptions, and many people in China are also worried about this. So, since the Three Gorges Dam plays such an important role, do we have any good response plans?

In fact, regarding the safety of the Three Gorges Dam, China had already considered this issue at the beginning of its design.

Reasonable design to avoid risks

In order to avoid tragedy, China's military industry has conducted several strike tests specifically targeting the Three Gorges Dam, which not only took into account high-explosive ammunition, but also base-penetrating bombs, cluster bombs, and even nuclear bombs with an explosive equivalent of millions of tons, to prevent it from being used by those with ulterior motives.

After comprehensive testing, China finally chose the appropriate dam type to withstand possible attacks, which is a concrete gravity dam.

Traditional dam types, such as earth dams, concrete arch dams or concrete panel dams, will collapse at an extremely fast speed under the pressure of water flow and cause great harm as long as they suffer a major blow.

But the concrete gravity dam is different. Its principle, in simple terms, is to artificially pile up a mountain of reinforced concrete. The power of ordinary missiles cannot shake its operation.

Even if the missile's power could really reach the Three Gorges Dam, at most it would just create a gap or a hole, which is almost the same as a water leak. The water flow would not break other parts of the dam, and naturally would not cause secondary disasters, let alone pose a major flood threat to the downstream.

To take a step back, even if the conditions for bombing the Three Gorges Dam are met, there are a few issues that cannot be ignored.

Meaningless behavior

First, we need to consider the location of the Three Gorges. It is in Hubei Province, and Hubei is surrounded by provinces no matter where it is located.

It is China's hinterland. There are several situations in which bombing missions can be carried out deep into China's hinterland: enemy infiltration, missiles, and aircraft.

The possibility of enemy infiltration had long been speculated on the Internet, but it was ruled out soon because it is impossible to shake the Three Gorges Dam with human power. Moreover, China has deployed important defense forces at the Three Gorges Dam, so the enemy will not have any chance.

Generally speaking, if airplanes and missiles can succeed, then wouldn't the air defense system that China has built over the years be in vain?

Second, even if the other side invests a huge amount of money to use quantitative bombing, the key is, what are they trying to achieve? Do they want to make the people suffer greatly? Do they want to cause China to suffer huge losses?

Fundamentally speaking, bombing the Three Gorges Dam is completely meaningless. Why not use missiles and planes that can blow up the Three Gorges Dam to bomb more useful military facilities or high-value targets?

After all, it has come to the point of blowing up the Three Gorges Dam, so China must have had a conflict with one party. Since there is a conflict, anyone who uses his brain knows that the first thing to do is to destroy the opponent's follow-up forces, that is, some military facilities or factories.

However, it is really hard to understand why they left the military facilities and the factories producing armaments undestroyed, and instead chose to spend a lot of effort to destroy the Three Gorges Dam, which might not even be destroyed.

https://inf.news/en/military/b7302feb4b13db3f1e50af20d27b9c65.html