China hacked a Navy contractor and secured sensitive data on submarine warfare

Everything you say is true, but extremely misleading. China's nuclear posture uses what's called the "minimum means of reprisal", which means they have an extremely small nuclear force that is incapable of completing the scenario you outline.

Let me just quote the abstract from Jeffery Lewis's phd dissertation on the topic:

Among the 5 states authorized under the NPT to possess nuclear weapons, China has the most restrained pattern of deployment: The People"s Republic of China (PRC) operationally deploys about 80 nuclear warheads exclusively for usewith land"based ballistic missiles. Its declaratory doctrine rejects the initiation of nuclear war under any circumstance. The PRC does not maintain tactical nuclear forces of any kind, and its strategic forces are kept off alert, with warheads in storage. This posture has been sustained over time and changes in threat perception, suggesting restraint is the result of choice and not expediency.

Furthermore, most of the land based ballistic missiles China has deployed are targeted at India, and not capable of hitting the mainland US.

While the dissertation was written in 2004, essentially nothing substantial has changed since then.

China is short, by an order of magnitude, in the number of nuclear weapons necessary to perform a reliable first-strike against US silo and air-base sites.

Even if you can find and take out a ballistic missile sub, you cannot with any certainty take out all of them. A single one of those Ohio-class submarine, and its 24 MIRVs is perfectly capable of killing hundreds of millions of people, if launched at China's coast.

China's nuclear arsenal, like the arsenals of France, India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom, is purely defensive. Life is not a Tom Clancy novel. Russia and the United States are the only countries capable of carrying out a first strike against a nuclear state... And neither of them can do so against the other.

China is one of the countries with the most to lose, and the least to gain in a nuclear exchange.

Compare this to Facebook effectively selling a Chinese firm the entire social graph. Not any firm, a firm the US Government indicated should be regarded with caution.

That social graph will pay dividends decades after these missiles are decommissioned.

Conversely, if DoD contracts are sufficient, why aren't Facebook contracts? China doesn't care about contracts in either case. If you think a Chinese firm is going to honor a contract with an American company, you need to look up the Organization Department.

Citations needed.

I know some intelligence people. This isn't what they tell me. They tell me that western governments are obsessed with following the law and limiting what their cyber operations touch. It's born out by what I understand from non-classified sources. For example, I read through the source code of Stuxnet when it first came out. There was a ton of guards put in to limit the potential damage it made.

That Canada spies on the USA more than Russia is the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. Read the Snowden leaks and listen to natsec podcasts. The Russians are in a ton of the US infrastructure and the CIA is freaking out about it to the point where they consider cyber to be a bigger existential threat than a nuclear armed DPRK.

>1950s era US ICBM fleet

Minuteman III is 1970s era.

>Destroy the few dozen 1950s era upgraded B-52s and a few misc aircraft.

That's actually incredibly hard.

>Step 3. Take out the ~14 outdated US ballistic missile subs using new supersonic anti-ship missiles.

Target subs with AShMs!? Come again?