TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The head of a major U.S. policy think tank says that if China invades Taiwan and destroys its semiconductor plants, it would be a "global catastrophe" with the world soon "plunging off an economic cliff."

On Monday (Oct. 3), Jason Matheny, president and chief executive of the U.S. think tank RAND Corp penned an op-ed in The Atlantic. In the piece, Matheny lays out the possible economic consequences should China invade Taiwan and the steps the U.S. can take to prevent Beijing from attacking.

Matheny, a national security expert, said Taiwan accounts for 92% of all advanced microchips, thus any attack on the country would greatly jeopardize the global chip supply. He predicted that this semiconductor manufacturing capacity could suffer one of two fates if China invades, but in either case, it would result in a "global catastrophe."

In the first scenario, China would manage to keep Taiwan's semiconductor plants largely intact, but would tightly restrict U.S. and allied access to advanced chips based on its whims, much to the detriment of "American technological, economic, and military advantages." However, if China were to destroy Taiwan's chip factories, the world could suffer an economic crisis, "not seen since the Great Depression," argued Matheny.

He suggested one way to avoid such an economic disaster would be for the U.S. to wean itself off dependence on chips from Taiwan and other foreign countries. Although the CHIPS Act is specifically geared to start this process, Matheny warned that it would probably take decades before the U.S. can produce enough chips to meet its own domestic demand.

Another option would be for the U.S. to quickly intervene militarily to protect Taiwan's vital chip-building infrastructure. The flaw with this plan would be that many of Taiwan's semiconductor plants on its coasts would likely already be shattered before U.S. forces could arrive.

Matheny's third option would be to make Taiwan's porcupine defense bristle with a large number of smaller, mobile asymmetrical weapons such as "High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), drones, loitering munitions, anti-tank missiles, and sea mines." He said that bolstering Taiwan's asymmetrical defenses would provide substantive deterrence "within a couple of years, rather than decades."

He cautioned that one major glitch with this plan is the serious bottleneck in the U.S. production of such weapons systems, due in large part to a shortage of microchips.