[Skybird]

The US will not nuke in defence of Taiwan. They are not suicidal and will not trade LA and San Francisco for Taiwan. Because China will atomically retaliate against a nuclear strike, and this then will escalate, away from tactical nukes on the ocean to "strategic" nukes in the countries.

However, whether China will start with nukes, is something different. Normally they would not, but they are so drunk of patriotism and megalomania now and so full of themselves and seeing themsleves on the mission to bring heavenly order back to the universe with China naturally being at the centre of all things, that I will not rule out a desastrous miscalculation of theirs that makes them using nukes first. More unlikely than likely maybe - but not impossible. Hybris we call it. For China, the past 200 years of Western dominance were just a little mishap in history. The order of nature and all things in the human world see China as the very centre of everything. That the West must bow to China's claim for global hegemony , is not even explicitly demanded because it must not even be demanded: it is simply implicitly taken for granted, most naturally, like we imply that the word "raining" implies the falling of rain drops from "up" to "down", never the other way around - you must not point this fact explicitly out that it is so, because it just is so.