NUCLEAR ESCALATIONHow to Manage Escalation with Nuclear Adversaries Like China
Chinese leaders fled Beijing in October 1969, as a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union seemed imminent. They were on the precipice of nuclear war owing to a remarkable series of missteps and miscommunications. The crisis of 1969 holds some important lessons for U.S. military planners as they think through how a future war with China could unfold. It needs a theory of victory that explains not just how it plans to win, but how it plans to win without triggering a nuclear war.
Chinese leaders fled Beijing in October 1969. A nuclear attack from the Soviet Union seemed imminent.They ordered people to stockpile supplies and prepare for war. They readied their own nuclear weapons for launch. And then they evacuated to make sure they and their government would survive.
They had come to this point, staring down the precipice of nuclear war, through a remarkable series of missteps and miscommunications.Seven months earlier, they had ordered a small ambush of Soviet forces on a disputed island in the middle of nowhere. They had intended to teach the Soviets a “bitter lesson.” It had blown up in their faces.
The crisis of 1969 holds some important lessons for U.S. military planners as they think through how a future war with China could unfold. Once the shooting starts, a recent RAND paper warned, the U.S. would face escalation risks it has not experienced since the Cold War. It needs a theory of victory that explains not just how it plans to win, but how it plans to win without triggering a nuclear war. It needs to account for the same blur of confusion that took China and the Soviet Union to the brink in 1969.
“This would be very, very different from what the vast majority of the U.S. military has ever experienced,” said Jacob Heim, a senior policy researcher at RAND. “The U.S. needs a clear vision of how it can win a war with China without catastrophic escalation.”
The answer, until recently, was pretty straightforward. If the Chinese ever tried to invade Taiwan, the U.S. would meet them with overwhelming force. It would shoot down enough Chinese airplanes, sink enough Chinese ships, that China would have no choice but to back down. In military circles, that’s known as denial. The U.S. would deny China any hope of victory.
But China has made that much, much harder. It has built up its military to the point that it’s not at all clear it would be the loser in that war. In wargames conducted over the past ten years or so, the Chinese side has not infrequently “cleaned [our] clock,” said former deputy assistant secretary of defense David Ochmanek, now a senior researcher at RAND. And so some U.S. strategists have started to reach for a different approach.
