The US wants to wage offensive war against China, not defend against or deter some putative invasion from China.

They know that Chinese aggression is highly unlikely, as China is playing the long game of economic and social absorption. But they just want to trigger just enough aggression from China to wrong foot it, to use that as a pretext to wage aggressive, diffuse, dispersed, distributed long range standoff attacks against China from all across the 1st island chain, but especially from Taiwan.

Therefore, if anyone thinks the US is simply trying to “deter” a war over Taiwan, they’ve drunk long and deep of the US Kool Aid. Likewise, those who think the US is simply selling vanity weapons to feed its weapons industry. Of course, the military industrial complex wants money–windfall profits actually–, but the US also wants kinetic war against China, because the structure of the global order (and the rentier profit (i.e. free money) that it gets from this order) is imperiled by the rise of a non-US-hegemonic multipolar world, that China is leading. It will end the world before it will allow this order to end, because the end of that order is the end of its world. If the host tries to free itself from a parasite, the parasite sees that as the end of the world. And if China can’t do battle, all the better from the standpoint of the US. It will take the battle to them.

This is all mapped out in their battle doctrine, “AirSea Battle” and other policy papers. AirSea Battle doctrine comes out of the US battle doctrine against the USSR, “AirLand Battle” (colloquially referred to as “Shock and Awe” and used in Kosovo and Iraq/ME). ALB is itself drawn from IDF strategy during the Yom Kippur war–deep, offensive, decapitating strikes against the Egyptian and Syrian capitals. We see some of this in the attacks on Gaza.

ASB involves deep, penetrating, aggressive strikes into the heartland of China’s command and control. These attacks could very easily use tactical nukes. You do not need new, specialized delivery vehicles to launch nukes at the distances that Taiwan makes possible. Tomahawk missiles–of which the US is selling Japan 100’s– are designed to, and can very easily carry nuclear warheads. A W80 warhead, weighing about 130kg, placed on the Tomahawk, can carry an explosive force of up to 150KT of TNT (9-10X that of the HIroshima bomb), And currently there is discussion in Washington about preparing pre-emptive nuclear strikes against China.