Probably a completely idiotic suggestion, but why can't the US secretly provide Taiwan with a few nukes if things really heat up as a very last measure to deter China.
If war is still preventable showing the nukes will just escalate things.
I am sure we have provided them some weapons. Not sure conventional or nuclear.
Ok, they reveal them. What is next? Nukes are not magic. They are just weapons. What do you think would happen once they are “revealed”?
What delivery mechanism are you proposing? Should they be aimed counter-force or counter-value? (Meaning are they trying to shoot the chinese nuclear launchers or are they lobbing them into chinese cities?) How are you protecting the nukes in Taiwan?
I'd wager that if you're amassing forces to conduct an invasion and midway through you discovered your target has nukes pointed at you, the very least you'd do is rethink your strategy and put a pause on operations.
I don't follow. What exactly leads you to believe that lobbing nukes at an invasion force's staging area and/or neighboring military bases "does not have a credible chance of hurting" the invader?
I hope you will believe me without proper citations that they just have a lot of troops.[1] And there is no reason to think they would need to bunch them up. How many smuggled in nukes are we imagining here?
1: this is the orbat of the Chinese rocket forces from 2020 https://www.aboyandhis.blog/post/mapping-the-people-s-libera...
If they do, problem solved. If they don't, at that stage it probably didn't hurt.
Taiwan can also draw a giant jellyfish in the sand on a beach and tell China to back down. If they do, problem solved. If they don't, at that stage it probably didn't hurt.
The trick is that once you demonstrated your capability (either nuke detonation or giant jellyfish drawing) you need to explain to your adversary how this capability is going to cause them pain they cannot bear. This part is unclear with your plan and mine too!
So why even bother with defending Taiwan if the number of Chinese casualties doesn't matter to the chinese?
being a fairly calculated player I believe that there exists some threshold of pain that even china would think twice before shrugging it off.
> being a fairly calculated player I believe that there exists some threshold of pain that even china would think twice before shrugging it off.
This is not in doubt. It just that nukes are not magic. They are not an automatic “you won” card.
The most sensible thing I can think of with nukes regarding the protection of Taiwan is to hit Chinese deep sea harbours. If you can distrupt enough of them then maybe they can’t board their troops. But that is a lot of warheads, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they can restore some semblance of operations even in a nuked harbour.
Then China detonates ten over open waters, and tells "you" to back down and not go there.
The magic deterrent value of nukes (mutually assured destruction) doesn't work if one side can't assure destruction of the other. Even if Taiwan can manage such a show of nuclear force, China can (credibly) threaten to annihilate it if it attacks, but the reverse isn't true.
Exactly!
China has ~350 warheads, and they play a shell game where they have more silos than ICBMs and they are swapping the ICBMs around the empty silos and nobody knows which one is full and which one is empty. Which means if you are targeting their nuclear forces you need to spend much more warheads to knock out all of theirs. That is a lot of warheads (and delivery mechanism) to “secretly smuggle in”. And even after you somehow knock out all their nukes China has their conventional forces, they are angry and fair to say justified in tearing Taiwan apart.
If Taiwan decides to target chinese cities. Do you think China will say “whoohooo, you won”? They will be very angry, the Chinese people will demand the attacker’s head, on top of Tawain just lost significant international support for basically killing civilians by the millions.
Of course they can also aim at invading conventional forces, but if China is just a little bit competent they won’t bunch up enough of their troops to make a nuke justified. Meaning that Taiwan would waste a whole warhead and delivery mechanism to sink a single ship, or knock out an enemy harbour. They can do it, but they can also probably do it conventionaly.
I don’t think brandishing nukes is going to help the Taiwanese government here.
And more every day. I've read they're estimated to have 1000 by the end of the decade.
The question is, can Taiwan get there? I doubt it, and if it tries and fails to reach the threshold, it will only provoke China (or more specifically, the Chinese leadership).
Limited nuclear war is an automatic loss condition for Taiwan, but it's only very costly to China. I believe nuclear weapons in Taiwan is one of China's stated red lines that will trigger war.
If it is some ideological goal then I agree the threshold might be impossible to get to, but if the goal is to become the worlds super power than a few strategic nukes can definitely makes a big impact.
Now I don't view the CCP as being fanatic, they have power based goals, and if those goals are made impossible by a few nukes then that should change things.
What do you think would be the point of Taiwan having secret nukes? What would they do with them?
Or for that matter non-secret nukes?
They don't need to do that quite yet though, as despite the media panic, an invasion of Taiwan is years, is not decades away from being attempted.
China is a real threat, but it's more over the long term, than any immediate concerns.
Seems consistent enough with decades
There is nothing ‘thankfully’ about watching millions of people be vaporised or their skin melting off and children with cancers?
NATO has been all fired up to balkanize Russia and start WWIII. I won't hear any whining and moaning when the dream comes true. I won't stand for it no matter HOW many people die.