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Notes -
Thanks for the forthright response.
As for why I model that as most likely, well, a couple of things:
Taiwan is bad for the PRC and bad for the West if abandoned. It's bad for the PRC, or at least those in power there, because the CPC's power is based to a large extent on a perception that they will reclaim all that was lost in the Century of Humiliation, and because they've dug themselves a hole by emphasising Taiwan in their propaganda to the point that they are starting to lose legitimacy by not going for it (there was popular outrage over Nancy Pelosi's plane not being shot down, for instance, despite how hilariously-stupid that would have been). It's bad for the West because Taiwan is the weak link in the First Island Chain that keeps the PLAN from doing anything outside the SCS and ECS in event of war, and because Biden specifically said that the USA would intervene to defend Taiwan in the event of an attack. So there's a substantial possibility that neither side will back down. Paul Symon's interview, which I linked and transcribed a while back, notes that short-term incentives are for the PRC's intelligence services not to say "don't do this, everything will explode if you do this", which is a perennial problem with highly-nationalistic regimes and which doesn't help (my read of his talk about "a linear path" is that probably the Five Eyes have spotted preparations for a Taiwan attack, though as he said leaders' decisions matter i.e. Xi could just call that off at any point before shots are fired).
Such a war would almost certainly go nuclear if continued for more than a month or two. The fundamental problem is the fragility of the Chinese nuclear deterrent. I'd like to avoid a hot war with Russia, of course, but there's a significant chance that even a long such war would not go nuclear, because both sides' deterrents are secure and thus there is no need to put nuclear forces on hair-trigger in order to assure MAD; the Russians could afford to lose a lot of their missiles on the ground and still retain the ability to blow up most large US cities, and vice versa with the USA losing a lot of its missiles. But the Chinese deterrent is not very good; it does have a triad, but the sea leg of the triad is weak (due to the aforementioned First Island Chain), the air leg has no hope of getting to Europe or the USA, and the land leg would be within range of US SLBMs and nuclear bombers with their short warning times (also, not that many warheads compared to the USA or Russia). Thus, the Chinese deterrent would have to be on a hair-trigger in order to be any use at all, and the USA would be tempted to also be on a hair-trigger so that in case of launches beginning or an intercepted launch order it could destroy as much as possible on the ground; this in turn means that sooner or later there'd be a false alarm with one side thinking the other's launched and no time to confirm and oh whoops, nine-digit casualties. My guess is about 1-2% per day that this happens; I ran this by someone in the business and he said it's the right OoM. Do note that satellites and their excellent launch detection would be out very quickly in this scenario; Chinese war plans for decades have been to open up such a war with massive ASAT use, because of how immensely-powerful US military satellites are and because they don't care so much about Kessler syndrome.
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