According to an apparently still-classified document that sheds new light on how dangerous the crisis was, when communist Chinese forces started shelling islands occupied by Taiwan in 1958, the US rushed to back up its ally with military action, including drawing up plans to launch nuclear strikes on mainland China. Hundreds of pages from a secret 1966 analysis of the conflict indicate that US military leaders pressed for a first-use nuclear attack on China, despite the possibility that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally, killing millions of civilians. When the report was declassified for public release, the government censored those pages.
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked a secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers 50 years ago, revealed the document. Ellsberg said he copied a top-secret report on the Taiwan Strait crisis at the same time but did not reveal it. He’s bringing it up now because of fresh tensions between the US and China over Taiwan.
Although it was previously understood that US officials considered using atomic weapons against mainland China if the crisis worsened, the pages show in new detail how aggressive military leaders were in pressing for authority to do so if communist forces, who had begun shelling the so-called offshore islands, escalated their attacks.
In 1958, the crisis subsided when Mao Zedong’s communist forces stopped attacking the islands, leaving them in the hands of Chiang Kai-Republic shek’s of China forces based in Taiwan. More than six decades later, there is still strategic doubt regarding Taiwan’s position — and the United States’ ability to protect it with nuclear weapons.
According to Odd Arne Westad, a Yale University historian who specializes in the Cold War and China and who checked the pages for The New York Times, the previously censored material is important both historically and now.
“This suggests, at least to me, that we came closer to the US using nuclear weapons” during the 1958 crisis, he said. “This is a far more illustrative degree than what we’ve seen in terms of how decision-making actually took place.”
Westad said the documents provided fodder to warn of the risks of an escalating conflict over Taiwan, drawing comparisons to today’s tensions, as China’s traditional military might has risen well beyond that of 1958, and it has its own nuclear weapons.
The documents indicate that even in 1958, officials denied that the US could effectively protect Taiwan with only conventional weapons. “It would place immense pressure on US politicians, in the event of such a war, to think about how they could deploy nuclear weapons,” Westad said.
“That should serve as a wake-up call to all involved,” he added.
Ellsberg said that revealing a historical antecedent for current conflicts was precisely the point he wanted the public to discuss. He said that within the Pentagon, contingency planning for the likelihood of an armed conflict over Taiwan was possibly underway, including what to do if any conventional defenses appeared to be failing.
“As the prospect of another nuclear crisis over Taiwan is being bandied around this year, it seems very timely to me to urge the media, Congress, and the executive branch to pay attention to what I make available to them,” he said of the “shallow” and “reckless” high-level discussions during the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis, which he described as “shallow” and “reckless.”
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