Taiwan is developing missiles capable of covering a range of up to 1,000km to defend the country against a possible attack, the defense minister said yesterday.
Minister of National Defense Lee Jye's (李傑) comments came just two days after Taiwanese military officials revealed that a computer simulation of a war with China envisioned Taiwan using unidentified missiles to take out Chinese military bases across the 160km-wide Taiwan Strait.
Lee yesterday said the "Tactical Shore-based Missile for Fire Suppression" (TSMFS) is being developed with the US government's approval.
"The TSMFS is a defense missile system," he said. "It can be used against Chinese missile attacks. The US government is well-informed of the plan."
The minister made the remarks in response to lawmakers' questions yesterday morning.
Other than admitting that the maximum range for the "TSMFS" will be 1,000km, Lee said that other details of the missile system remain confidential.
"I have no idea what targets in China the missiles may hit," he said. "Democratic Progressive Party Chairman Yu Shyi-kun once said during his term as premier that our missiles could easily destroy China's Three Gorges Dam, and his comment has seriously made our job a lot more difficult. Please stop speculating."
The minister told lawmakers that China has a superior military force. As such, Taiwan would never challenge China and the TSMFS would only be used for defense.
Taiwanese missile development is a sensitive issue for the US, which provides defensive weaponry but has been reluctant to sell arms that could be used to attack China.
Opposition lawmakers have expressed concern that the US could still pull the plug on the missile program by withholding sophisticated satellite guidance technology from the Taiwanese military.
As for last week's simulated war game, Lee said President Chen Shui-bian (
Regarding recent criticism that the military asked its officers to commit suicide should they be surrounded by enemies during the war game, Lee emphasized that the war game only simulated the worst-case scenario.
"Again, we still have to figure out what we should do when the worst happens. That was not the focus of the war game," Lee said.
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
RSS