Newly disclosed documents appear to prove that military strategists in Washington pushed for the White House to create preparations to deploy nuclear weapons on mainland China during the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1958.
The records, which were originally reported on by the New York Times on Saturday, expose the scope of Washington’s deliberations on deploying nuclear weapons to stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, including some US military officers’ approval of hypothetical retaliatory nuclear strikes on US facilities.
The Times received the fresh evidence from Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who revealed the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which showed the US government’s deceit in its management of the Vietnam War.
“US first use of nuclear weapons should not be contemplated, prepared, or threatened anywhere, under any circumstances, including the defense of Taiwan,” Ellsberg said in a post to his Twitter on Sunday.
The Taiwan leak originates from previously classified portions of a 1966 study on the 1958 Taiwan Straits crisis by think tank Rand Corporation, authored by M. H. Halperin for the Office of the then-Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Following a terrible civil war, the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan when the Communist Party won control in mainland China in 1949.
However, Beijing considered the island to be part of its territory, and the two sides battled periodically throughout the next decades.
The United States and China came closest to war in 1958, during the Taiwan Strait crisis, when the People’s Republic of China launched artillery towards Taipei’s outlying islands.
The bombardment was concentrated on the Quemoy and Matsu island groupings, which are located between Taiwan and mainland China and are defined by Rand Corporation as Taipei’s “first line of defense.”
Although the Eisenhower administration discussed using nuclear weapons to stop China from attacking Taiwan, the records appear to expose the breadth of the preparations for the first time.
According to the WikiLeaks documents, some US Defense and State Department officials were afraid that the loss of the outlying islands in 1958 would result in a complete “Chinese Communist takeover of Taiwan.”
In the event of an air and sea attack on the islands, US Air Force Gen. Nathan Twining said the US would have to use nuclear weapons against Chinese air force bases “to prevent a successful air interdiction campaign,” beginning with “low-yield ten to fifteen kiloton nuclear weapons.” would have no alternative but to conduct nuclear strikes deep into China as far north as Shanghai.”
According to the documents, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs acknowledged this would “almost certainly” lead to nuclear retaliation against Taiwan and the US military base at Okinawa in Japan.
Given China had yet to develop its own nuclear capabilities, any nuclear retaliation would have come from the Soviet Union, possibly sparking an even more devastating global conflict. Kuter, the top Air Force commander for the Pacific, “flatly” states that any US air action against a Chinese attack on the outlying islands “had no chance of success unless atomic weapons were used from the outset.”
Joshua Pollack, editor of the Nonproliferation Review, said on Twitter Sunday that the idea the US would have risked a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union over islands with “no military value” was “jarring.”
