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<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="mw6-ns center pv3-ns _pt4-l pv4-l georgia _avenir mw7-l _pb4-l"><h2 class="lh-title _balance-text f2-p f2-ns f1-l f3 ma0" style="line-height:1.2em">US planned nuclear attack on Chinese cities in 1958 Taiwan crisis</h2></div><div class="mw6-ns mw7-l center"><h5 class="avenir lh-title bn-p b--black-10 mt3 bb pb3 ma0"><div class="f6-ns b f7 f5-l"><a class="underline-hover no-underline" href="https://www.wsws.org/en/authors/Andre-Damon">Andre Damon</a>/<a href="http://wsws.org" class="">WSWS.ORG</a></div><div class="black-60 f7 normal mt1"><span class="relative" style="top:1px"><svg class="relative dib mr1" version="1.1" id="Layer_1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" x="0px" y="0px" viewBox="12 12 24 24" style="width:0.9em;fill:currentColor;enable-background:new 0 0 48 48" xml:space="preserve"><g id="clock"></g></svg></span></div></h5></div><header class=""><div class="mw6-ns mw7-l center"><h5 class="avenir lh-title bn-p b--black-10 mt3 bb pb3 ma0"><div class="black-60 f7 normal mt1"><time datetime="2021-05-26T04:58:03.000Z" class="">25 May 2021</time>Daniel
Ellsberg, the US nuclear strategist who leaked the Pentagon papers, has
published classified documents making clear that US generals were
aggressively pushing for a nuclear attack on Chinese cities in 1958.</div></h5></div></header><div class="relative body"><div class="f5-p content f4-m georgia _avenir lh-copy f5 _measure-wide f4-l"><p class="">In
order to maintain control over two tiny islets, Quemoy and Matsu, just
kilometres off the coast of China, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff were
prepared to carry out nuclear attacks against major Chinese cities,
including Shanghai, and to accept the consequences of nuclear
retaliation by the Soviet Union against Taiwan, Japan and the United
States, leading to the deaths of millions.</p><figure class="ma0 overflow-hidden relative dn-p"><div class="overflow-hidden relative"><img class="db center relative" src="https://www.wsws.org/asset/e717913b-438d-4ba7-b090-51455537d4b5?rendition=image1280"></div><figcaption class="avenir lh-title tc db pt3 f7 ph3 f6-m black-60">A US B-52 nuclear-capable bomber (AP Photo)</figcaption></figure><p class="">These
documents are so explosive that the United States government sought to
keep them from public view for six decades. They have been revealed only
because Ellsberg—who copied them alongside the Pentagon Papers, which
exposed the motives behind the US war in Vietnam—is risking prosecution
under the Espionage act to make them known.</p><p class="">During the Second
Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1958, Pentagon war planners believed that the
islets of Quemoy and Matsu, a few kilometres from China’s coast, were
indefensible with conventional weapons. “The entire military
establishment assumed more and more that nuclear weapons would be used
in the event of hostilities,” noted the documents released by Ellsberg.</p><p class="">“Atomic
weapons would be employed by the United States and probably by the
enemy,” Pentagon planners noted, and “authority to attack targets on the
Chinese mainland would be granted.”</p><p class="">There would be “atomic weapons strikes by both sides” based on the premise that the “use of atomic weapons was inevitable.”</p><p class="">The
US high command pushed aggressively for the immediate use of nuclear
weapons against a Chinese offensive against the islands, while asserting
that US war aims would include the “destruction of Chinese Communist
war-making capability.”</p><p class="">The United States “would have no
alternative but to conduct nuclear strikes deep into China as far north
as Shanghai,” military planners declared. This would “almost certainly
involve nuclear retaliation against Taiwan and possibly against Okinawa”
in Japan, as well as potentially the US mainland.</p><p class="">The 1958
fighting between Taiwan and China was a continuation of the Chinese
Civil War that brought the Chinese Communist Party to power in 1949 and
forced the Kuomintang, under Chiang Kai-shek, to flee to Taiwan.</p><p class="">The
United States never reconciled itself to the “loss” of China as a
result of the Chinese Revolution, which was seen as a devastating blow
to US global domination.</p><p class="">With US backing, the Nationalists
established a military dictatorship on Taiwan, planned to reinvade the
mainland and continued to claim sovereignty over all of China. Taipei’s
territorial claims received recognition as such from Washington, and the
Taiwan regime even kept China’s seat in the UN Security Council,
complete with its veto power.</p><p class="">The First and Second Taiwanese
Strait crises took place only one and five years respectively after the
end of the Korean War, which was launched by the US and its puppet state
in South Korea in an effort to overthrow the Soviet-aligned government
in Pyongyang while threatening Beijing. Once Chinese troops came to the
aid of North Korea, General Douglas MacArthur argued for atomic bombs to
be dropped on China, which was averted only when he was removed as US
commander in chief in Korea.</p><aside data-track-content="true" data-content-name="33% of article" data-content-piece="/en/articles/2021/05/26/pers-m26.html" class=""></aside><p class="">Ultimately,
the US plans for nuclear war against China in 1958 were never tested
because China broke off attempts to regain the islets controlled by the
US-backed Kuomintang dictatorship on Taiwan.</p><p class="">Commenting on what is contained in the documents, Ellsberg observed,</p><blockquote class=""><p class="">“Christian
Herter, who succeeded John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, was
reported to have said later, ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis is often
described as the first serious nuclear crisis; those of us who lived
through the Quemoy crisis definitely regarded that as the first serious
nuclear crisis.’”</p></blockquote><p class="">Despite the explosive and highly
significant nature of the documents, they have not been reported in the
US press, with the exception of the <em class="">New York Times</em> article in which Ellsberg explained why he published them.</p><p class="">Ellsberg
has published these 63-year-old documents as a warning. As the United
States moves to strengthen ties with Taiwan and de facto recognize
Taiwanese independence—the geopolitical setup that created the second
Taiwan straits crisis—it must inevitably follow that the United States
is once again preparing to fight a nuclear war with China.</p><p class="">Noting
the “shallow” and “reckless” character of the 1958 discussions over the
use of nuclear weapons over Quemoy and Matsu, Ellsberg warned, “I do not
believe the participants were more stupid or thoughtless than those in
between or in the current cabinet.”</p><p class="">In other words, the same
murderous mindset that led the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1958 to demand
that President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorize immediate nuclear
retaliation against a conventional assault by China on tiny islets off
its coast exists today within the top brass, whose trigger fingers are
even more itchy to test out new “tactical” nuclear weapons at their
disposal.</p><p class="">In March, Navy Admiral Philip Davidson, head of the
Indo-Pacific Command, said the timetable for a US conflict with China
over the Taiwan strait “is manifest during this decade, in fact, in the
next six years.”</p><p class="">“We absolutely must be prepared to fight and win should competition turn to conflict,” Davidson said.</p><p class="">In
the months since the inauguration of Joe Biden, the United States has
carried out the most sweeping change to its relationship with Taiwan
since the adoption of the One China policy in 1978.</p><p class="">Biden is the
first American president since 1978 to host Taiwan’s ambassador at his
inauguration. Then, last month, the White House announced it was ending
limitations on official US government contacts with the Taiwanese
government, in what commentators argued was the effective end of the One
China policy.</p><p class="">In February, Biden convened a panel of defence
officials to reevaluate US policy toward China, which has until next
month to issue its findings. Speculation is rife that the Biden
administration will formally abandon the decades-long US policy known as
“strategic ambiguity” in relation to Taiwan—the position that has
underpinned the One China policy.</p><p class="">In establishing diplomatic
relations with China in 1979, Washington de facto accepted Beijing as
the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan, while
suggesting that it could come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of a war with
China. If “strategic ambiguity” is replaced by an explicit pledge to
defend Taiwan in a conflict with China, it will only encourage Taiwan to
declare formal independence from China—a move that Beijing has declared
it would oppose with military action.</p><aside data-track-content="true" data-content-name="66% of article" data-content-piece="/en/articles/2021/05/26/pers-m26.html" class=""></aside><p class="">In
other words, by undermining the One China policy and encouraging
Taiwanese separatism, Washington is creating the conditions for a war
between the United States and China, the two largest global economic
powers.</p><p class="">The United States has abandoned the Intermediate Range
Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty and is in active discussions with the
governments of Taiwan and Japan on stationing offensive weapons capable
of striking the Chinese mainland.</p><p class="">In order to fund its “Pacific
Deterrence Initiative,” the Pentagon has requested the doubling of its
budget for the Indo-Pacific region, while the Biden administration has
proposed the largest military budget in US history.</p><p class="">But wars are not fought through weapons alone. There must be a <em class="">casus belli</em>—a
justification to sell a predatory war to the public. The United States
media and political establishment is busy manufacturing a <em class="">casus belli</em>, centered at present on the claim that COVID-19 is a biological weapon manufactured by China.</p><p class="">Last year, the Trump administration’s trade adviser Peter Navarro, author of a 2006 book titled <em class="">The</em> <em class="">Coming China Wars</em>, charged that COVID-19 is a “weaponized virus” that was “spawned” by the Chinese Communist Party.</p><p class="">As the <em class="">World Socialist Web Site</em> warned at the time,</p><blockquote class=""><p class="">These
allegations have a definite logic. If the Chinese government
deliberately allowed and encouraged the coronavirus to infect the United
States and Europe, this would be an act of biological warfare that goes
far beyond the terrorist attacks of September 11. It would mean that
China had carried out an act of war against the United States.</p><p class="">With
unbridled recklessness, in order to justify its own criminal
indifference to the lives of millions of people, the Trump
administration is setting up a situation that can make military
confrontation with China unavoidable.</p></blockquote><p class="">At the time,
this conspiracy theory, with no scientific basis whatsoever, was
rejected by significant sections of the Democratic Party and major news
outlets. But over the past week, the Wuhan Lab conspiracy theory has
been openly embraced by all of the broadcast news networks, the White
House, and even Dr. Anthony Fauci, who previously condemned it. On
Monday, Fauci declared, “I am not convinced” about a natural origin of
the disease.</p><p class="">Under the Trump administration, US imperialism
carried out a strategic reorientation of its military policy. The
Pentagon declared that “Great power competition—not terrorism—is now the
primary focus of US national security.” The Trump White House left the
Intermediate Range Nuclear forces treaty, and began to “decouple” the US
economy from China.</p><p class="">Biden has intensified this build-up toward
conflict with China, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken declaring
that “China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military
and technological power to challenge the United States.”</p><p class="">Washington’s
war plans against China are rooted in the decades-long crisis of US
imperialism. With its share of global economic output declining year
after year, the United States sees military force and intimidation as
the only means of ensuring its continued global supremacy. The use of
military force against China—including the use of nuclear weapons—is
embedded in the logic of capitalist geopolitics.</p><p class="">But this does not
mean war is inevitable. In 1917, after four years of slaughter that led
to the deaths of over 20 million people, the working class of Russia
intervened to stop World War I by overthrowing the Tsarist autocracy and
the capitalist order that it defended.</p><p class="">This once again is the
only alternative to a new and far more catastrophic world war. If war is
to be avoided, the working class must intervene on the basis of a
socialist program aimed at uniting its forces across the globe in a
struggle to put an end to capitalism.</p></div></div></body></html>