Comment by Cumpiler69
4 days ago
I don't see how this is relevant or invalidates my point. You think the US will wait for the end of the war to do that or what?
Also, German scientists who could leave the country were fleeing to the US before the Nazi regime started WW2 and also during the war, before it was a formal operation to gather them as prisoners of war when Germany lost.
How is the US going to extract a whole bunch of Taiwanese citizens from an island which will be under a Chinese naval encirclement?
The point is that Operation Paperclip happened in the aftermath of a total strategic defeat of the German army, where the Allies were the victorious power.
Taiwanese scientists and engineers are currently living happily in Taiwan, which is not a fascist regime cracking down on civil liberties. So they're not going to flee before the war, and once the war starts "extract significant numbers of educated personnel" is literally identical in military complexity to "fight and defeat the Chinese naval blockade".