[jerf]

Having a card up your sleeve is still valuable, even if nobody knows it is there, because it means if you have to pull it out all of a sudden, it's there. Taiwan would be my A#1 pick for "country most likely to secretly have nuclear weapons" because while everyone around China has reason to be nervous at one level or another, Taiwan's clearly got the best one.

"The world" as a whole is also a bit jumpy about nuclear weapons, so pulling the card out early isn't free. If for the sake of argument Taiwan does have some prototypes lying around, they must have judged the risk of a reveal greater than the reward. But that can change swiftly.

One of the questions I find most interesting, from my civilian and total outsider position, is: How developed are the world's intelligence agencies? How good are countries at successfully keeping things secret from each other? Is it theoretically possible for Taiwan to have secretly developed a prototype bomb without China covertly knowing about it? (This is an especially interesting question in that for structural reasons, Taiwan and China have means to spy on each other relatively easily.) Is it in fact the case that everybody basically knows everything about everybody, or are there many, many successfully kept secrets? What are the probabilities of discovery? What's the appetite for risk of discovery within the relevant governments? I expect from my current position that it is simply impossible to get solid answers to these questions. It also seems to me that while the world does not care for countries overtly advertising they have a bomb, the game theory for covertly making it known to certain of your enemies that you have the bomb may be quite different.

[freech]

So china invades Taiwan, Taiwan nukes them, and then? China decides to nuke them of the map instead?

[jerf]

Are you demanding easy answers? There aren't any.

The goal is deterrence, but deterrence doesn't work if you don't have a credible threat, which means that you have to have the credible threat, and a sufficiently insane opponent may call you on it. It's the reason why China going to a dictatorship is scary... the details of the dictatorship are irrelevant, the mere fact that one man will be in charge of the military of China is intrinsically scary. This is one place where the general bias towards inaction and other problems of a committee are advantageous; history shows that an individual is much likelier to do something really stupid for really stupid reasons than any government that is run by many people, even if there is a clear leader. A committee may fail to exploit many opportunities and may in various ways run their country into the ground, or they may even engage in misguided military adventures, but they never really rise to the level of outright evil and stupidity that an individual can muster up.

For instance, if you've got a spare hour to listen, you could do worse than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdM3ID4m38U Which contains numerous examples of Napoleon doing stupid and evil things that cost thousands of lives and burned massive piles of reputation just to benefit himself. If you do watch that video, can you imagine a world in which that Napoleon has nukes? Or, can you imagine a world in which he has them, but doesn't use them? I can't.

So, alas, no, I can't promise that some of the really stupid wargame outcomes aren't on the table now. China could previously be modeled as reasonably rational, but that's rapidly going "poof", and yeah, that means some seriously bad outcomes are on the table, and the mere fact that they are seriously ugly doesn't take them off the table.