This tells me that US leaders have seriously mooted the idea of nuking China as a viable option in retaining hegemony. They are going Heinlein 'violence is the ultimate authority' and considered the retaliatory strike of ~300 nukes and worldwide condemnation is worth it if they can prevent China surpassing them.
US leaders need to be made to understand and digest the fact that going down such a route invites the possibility of genetically poisoning themselves and their descendants from strontium and cobalt clad thermonuclear weapons.
1) As emergency stopgap, buy some nukes from Russia... For mutual trust/security reasons Russia may not want to sell/transfer nukes wholesale to China nor would China "trust" Russia that much to accept delivery on face value, so just the refined core. Making nukes is 1950s technology but one of the bottleneck is the refining process if China wanted to scale up in quantity quickly....
2) Create and implement a modern deadhand/perimeter system and announce it to the Western world be it publically or secret gov back channels. Use a well trained AI nueral network that is hardcoded to strictly follow objectives/directives yet flexible to use its intuition and judgement in the proper big picture and high level context to make such decisions... simply, if it detects China has been wiped out or all humans in the chain of decision making are nuetralized, it starts an initialization to launch retailatory strike on its own... in the off chance the AI made mistake, it can only be overridden by the same members of CCP that would hold the authority to call a launch in the first place. So humans can launch without AI; AI can launch on its own but gives humans in the loop the chance to override and standdown... only when AI both believes China/CCP got destroyed by US and there is no countermand order that it would be able to go through with its self initiated launch...
3) I understand why nukes cannot be recalled once launched, but it doesnt have to be so binary. If China builds more quantity of nukes as it should this affords it to make a small portion of recall-able nukes, to be the first batch sent in the launch on detect group (assuming China change its policy of NFU etc) so if it turns out detection was mistake the nukes can be recalled but if it wasnt a mistake, China would still have available its stock of non-recallable nukes even if US compromised those initial batch of nukes and disabled them via the same mechanism as a recall code. And if all else fails then deadhand/perimeter AI would eventually kick in at the tail end...
4) As part of AI deadhand system Have a series of high orbiting satellites that scan for launches towards China if it detects a launch any one of those satellites can send an activation code to a much further away probe(s)/relay(s) and the probe(s) will constantly repeat the code/signal back to earth ...
Every now and then (say China has fully automated autonomous nuclear drone submarines) if these units pop up to get a reading if it gets hit with that signal it will launch its birds... likewise the same could apply to any other delivery vehicle and mechanism.. the point is if the probe/reflector/repeater/broadcaster is far away sufficently it affords China's deadhand mechanism months maybe years to extract revenge....
