Pure Chinese puffery.
No nation on earth can survive a nukular exchange with the US so long as the US has so much as a single ballistic missile submarine still at sea and in operation.
At any given moment there are +/-8 American SSBNs on patrol, each carrying 24 Trident II missiles, each tipped with eight MIRVs, each MIRV at least 5x more powerful than the Fat Man bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. That means that a single surviving “boomer” can destroy 192 cities from a stand-off distance of 4600 (statute) miles. And the odds of any power on earth (including the US) being able to locate and destroy all of the +/-8 SSBNs on patrol is exactly zero.
Nuking the US would be an act of self-immolation, regardless who does it.
Okay, but——
Brandon.