I don't think anyone's going to be concerned about much of anything regarding civilians, but mass civilian casualties have a reasonable probability to trigger a

I don't think anyone's going to be concerned about much of anything regarding civilians, but mass civilian casualties have a reasonable probability to trigger a Chinese countervalue strike. Sidenote: that's something they've been arming up for intensely the last few years, as well as preparing a vast number of "dummy" (or are they dummies?) siloes and some extensive infrastructure building for TELs. Anyway, with that calculus in mind, the US might just decide to skip the middleman and go for total (or as near-as-total as they can manage) commitment, or, alternatively, broaden the conventional war to include a wider range of land targets, underline the red line of further nuke usage, and something that would look like a total embargo (using superior USN sub forces) and cutoff from the world financial system. I personally think China would fear option 1 enough to not employ tactical weapons in any application, unless they were looking at invasion of the mainland. I'm simultaneously worried - although I don't think it likely - that poor leadership on the US side could retaliate with tactical weapons for any carrier sinking, conventional or not. It's gonna be a tense time regardless - hopefully the world navigates it[1] without the atom baring its fangs once again. Because when I say "nukes are like machine guns", that's not really selling it. A better comparison would be "the invention of fire", which gave rise to genus Homo. Also yeah, the "in theory" part is a rough one, given the chips being put on the table. [1] Which would be as simple as just saying out loud what country Taiwan is. Country or no? As with so many other ambiguous zones causing problems around the world. Oy.