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.