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Notes -
Out of curiosity, does that hold true at the cost of your own skull? At the cost of your children’s skull?
What if it’s a more sensible 7-8 digit pile of skulls? (9 digit means reaching at least ~10% of china’s population, which seems excessive).
Most of China's population is urban these days, and you need to blow up most of their industry i.e. cities to ensure no more nukes are built. You also (if they don't surrender) probably want state failure (given Rule 2 of war removes invasion as a feasible possibility for debellatio), which means the farm-to-plate pipeline probably falls apart and those not killed by nukes (or by fallout hitting water supplies) have a high chance of starving to death.
One would certainly hope that after the first few cities sprout mushroom clouds the PRC would surrender, and indeed that would keep it to a 7-digit or 8-digit number, but the problem the PRC has is that its governmental legitimacy to a large extent depends on the promise "under CPC rule, China will reclaim its rightful place as world leader and the Century of Humiliation will end" and they've spent 70 years drilling this promise into the populace; surrender in another war with the West would break that bargain, and so they might refuse to surrender even when that's obvious suicide.
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