China may have anywhere between 300 and 3000 nukes. With 3000 being an arbitrarily "high" number to make the point that we don't know. It also isn't that important for the scenario of war with Taiwan. Is your personal position that you feel China may not have enough nukes? Or that you feel any showdown with the US is approved only with a certain minimum?
The nuclear question is so bloody simple you ought to simply ignore new members rambling about that topic, particularly with respect to any real possible war scenarios.
To answer your question, the best and cheapest way to achieve MAD with the US is to ascertain a very accurate estimate of how many warheads and yield ranges would be necessary to satisfy the word "destruction" in MAD, figure out how many interceptors the US likely has, multiply that by 2, assume all those interceptors would hit (whether it's midcourse interception or whatever forms of interception/disruption there are), work out how effective your own early warning systems are to warn of incoming attack, where those point of failures may be, back them up and back them up again with fundamentally different technologies, make sure you can fire on warning "quick enough" (determined by intelligence gathering), make assumptions that a sizeable (you define it why don't you) portion of your own second strike may be negated, assume a portion may have issues or sabotage. Out of what you're left with, is it enough to satisfy the word "destruction". The method doesn't give a number per se but a distribution. Now out of that, manage the risk optimally if possible and decide. I wonder what that number would be. Whatever it is, it is pocket change for the PRC. The USSR, Russia, USA all have been doing at least this for many decades. China has more people than both put together to protect, a greater potential to protect, far more wealth and resources than Russia has to protect. Just stating some facts that would weigh in on that decision from the results of what I'm sure would be complex work.
Now what do you think it is?
As for how many nukes China has... lol this tiring old conversation. China in the 1980s announced that it has nuclear warhead stockpile "roughly equivalent to UK and France". The western estimates for China's 1980-1990s stockpile is around 300 warheads. This is a period of time China was no hegemon displacing threat to the US, had little of the same attention on it as it does now due to being hegemon displacing threat, and was a very keen and effective practitioner of hide your strength bide your time. Nearly 40 years have passed, generations of nuclear delivery systems have come into service and retired. In fact indeed also generation/s of warhead designs. China has enough nuclear material for thousands of warheads. The threat on China is greater than ever before. But it doesn't talk much about nuclear forces and has not updated its statement of its own nuclear strength or corrected any estimates based on the 1980s 1990s figures offered.
We really ought to separate the conversation on war, especially potential wars, with that of nuclear forces and warhead numbers. Ignore some attempts to bring converge those topics elsewhere.
