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Fragile by nuclear superpower standards yes but not by anyone else's! They have many mobile ground-based launchers. It'll be an absolute pain to find them and target them quickly enough. The siloes are there to soak up inbound missiles away from Chinese population centres, not so much for second strike.
As of 2022 they've been installing JL-3s on their submarine arm, they can hit the US from home waters. Now Chinese subs are generally thought to be awful but I wouldn't want to be an American attack sub in the East China Sea. The Chinese have littered it with fixed underwater sensors, just like the US has festooned other parts of the Pacific with similar.
Chinese boomers can camp in the Bohai Sea and dare any foreign submarine to hunt them there.
Does this work? Suppose you're South Korean president and you've got a few dozen recently-acquired A-bombs attached to short-range missiles. Are you going to demand that China refrain from sinking ships or you'll fire nukes at... what? The Chinese fleet? A Chinese airbase?
They could fire nukes back in greater number. Could you credibly threaten to go to strategic and start hitting Chinese cities, at which point your country would likely be razed? Only annexation by North Korea would make such a threat seem credible. It'd make more sense for South Korean leaders to accept some kind of satellite-relationship like Korea has usually had, Finlandization. Japan is a different story, they're relatively bigger and less exposed with more historical antipathy. Japan seems harder to subjugate.
Interesting.
Yes, this is what I meant. A general blockade of South Korea is an attempt to kill like 80% of its population via starvation; in that event there is no remaining Chinese capacity to deter SK from literally anything (starvation's a really-ugly way to go, so death by PLA nuke is arguably a mercy), so "we take you down with us in revenge" is fully credible (unlike the existing US nuclear umbrella, since a blockade of SK won't kill 80% of Americans). Of course, there's still the standard Chicken dynamic to deal with where the craziest has leverage, but that's true of literally all relations between unfriendly nuclear powers; the blockade's mostly irrelevant there. What SK nukes do is take it from "PRC has an unstoppable trump card short of nukes" to "normal nuclear brinkmanship".
But wouldn't the South Koreans come to some kind of negotiated deal with China before it got to that point? If they see that the Chinese blockade won't be broken quickly enough to avoid hunger and malnutrition, wouldn't they come to terms? Maybe there'd be some phoney federal agreement with North Korea that looks good on paper but does nothing IRL, maybe they have to share technology with China and give up some air or naval bases.
That seems like a much better deal than a nuclear war or starvation.
One might equally say "wouldn't the Chinese back off the blockade before it got to that point? That seems like a much better deal than having their capital nuked."
Nuclear brinkmanship, as I said, is a game of Chicken. Risk-aversion cuts both ways.
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