The "success" and "failure" refer to the PLA's performance in a conventional war; while "acceptable damage" and "unacceptable damage" refer to the level of devastation suffered by Chinese industrial assets. The upper left is what I previously called scenario 3, the ideal outcome from China's perspective.
My question here is, why were things allowed to become that way? The principal goal of issuing these sorts of nuclear warnings is to deter a given behavior. If tomorrow, for instance, the US were to violate all of China's red lines and Taiwan were to declare abject independence - that would be a
failure of Chinese deterrence. Similarly, if the nuclear capabilities of the PLA are clearly and definitively given conditions that would result in their use - the goal of doing so is to prevent the US from doing those things.
Where you seem to get off to a strange start is that you don't differentiate between deterrence and punishment. Where deterrence is communicating a message that a nation is both wiling and able to disrupt and cause pain to an operational system, and possesses the ultimate goal of preventing an adversary from engaging in a specific behavior; Punishment's goal is to
actually create disruption/pain in the operational system which communicates a message of not to do something. The key difference here is that you should never want to have to use your deterrent. Thus, it cannot be threatened to be used in many cases short of national survival. Something as small in scale as a shipyard, a factory, or a port when compared to the existence of the People's Republic of China simply are not on anywhere near the same magnitude of importance.
If the PLA were to come to blows with the US, and the US were to attack Dalian and Jiangnan at the outset of the conflict, and the PLA were to employ tactical nuclear weapons as "punishment" for those actions, it would be a blunder of colossal scale. Not only would Dalian and Jiangnan
still be destroyed, but now the US has been nuked (which means their deterrence has failed); and they are
entirely willing to switch to "punishment" as a result. From here, the best case scenario is a tactical nuclear war ensuing - and the worst is global thermonuclear apocalypse.
My point in this is that if strategic deterrents are used haphazardly or overzealously with the hope of gaining an advantageous state of affairs (i.e. the mainland being off limits to US attack), they are extremely vulnerable to being either discredited if there is no follow-through, or leading to calamitous results if there is.
Well here's the other thing, the US has a price to pay and risks to run if it wants to keep the entire Pacific lol. Sure, everybody wants an empire when they can get it for free, it's when they start having to pay for it that things get more complicated. I'm sure I don't need to tell you given your job and the circles you frequent how much more complicated things are getting.
This isn't about what the US wants, it's about what the US is going to get.
I absolutely agree. If the US wants to hold on to its current position in the Western Pacific, it'll have to fight for it one of these days. Ultimately I think if it came to blows, the US would end up in a comparatively worse position than it's in now. I don't really think there's anyone contesting that if the US wants to remain essentially the global hegemon that it will be forced to contend with China's rapid rise one way or another.
An an overwhelming majority (if not the totality) of Americans with them. Make sure that factors into your calculations and remains at the forefront of your public's consciousness.
Yes, I am fully aware of this. Americans are fully aware of this. This is not news. My point is that employing nuclear weapons is basically the capstone to what ought to be a series of escalations culminating in there being existential threat to the state, if their use is to be justified. If the conditions before ending the world in a global thermonuclear exchange are considered superior to the conditions after doing so, there is simply no reason to do so. While this preference varies person to person (you for instance seem to be quite trigger happy, and ostensibly would trade the lives of billions upon billions of people (including your own) to punish the US if they defeat the PLA in the field), most people consider being alive and being in an intact, non-wasteland nation minus a couple of factories, ports, what have you - to be a preferable state of affairs compared to living (or not living) in an irradiated wasteland. It's madness to involve nuclear weapons for something of this nature; and were the CMC similarly overzealous as you, I'd recommend everyone in this thread topic start stocking up on Potassium Iodide.
