Taiwan war goes nuclear

The Nuclear Dimension A military conflict in the Taiwan Strait will have a nuclear dimension regardless of whether the United States is directly involved. Both Taiwan and China know that the latter is nuclear armed and could, at least in theory – but in violation of its No First Use policy – use nuclear weapons against Taiwan.[39] The nuclear dimension is intensified if the United States is factored in, because it means that two nuclear-armed great powers are on opposing sides of an armed conflict. It is intensified further if we make the plausible assumption that one of the reasons that Taiwan is interested in protection from the United States is that the latter has nuclear weapons. America’s arsenal constitutes one of the main appeals of extended deterrence. But it also means that the United States needs to factor in China’s nuclear prowess when it considers the assistance it offers to Taiwan in an armed conflict and the actions it is willing to take against China’s forces.[40] There are more deliberate and less deliberate ways in which the threshold could be crossed from a Taiwan Strait conventional armed conflict to one involving nuclear weapons. In terms of the deliberate side of the equation, it cannot be exaggerated how big such a decision – by China, by the United States, and/or by both – would be for course of the war and the course of history. Why then might either of them be willing to violate the nuclear taboo that has been in place since 1945? Under what circumstances would such a step make any sense at all as a deliberate policy choice? We can take some solace that there is no obvious answer to these questions. But there are still some more detailed issues that need to be considered. For example, even if China has been emboldened by its dominant cross-Strait military position to intensify its conventional attacks on Taiwan as the crisis moves into war, it would end up encountering a different balance of military power to the extent that the United States becomes involved. Of course the latter comes with much greater immediate risks than it once did. American analysts may be increasingly aware of the costs and risks of intervening militarily in a Taiwan Strait crisis. They may wonder how quickly the US could reposition its forces for a more protracted conflict with China. Hence Washington probably has less scope to repeat its 1996 playbook. It is arguably harder for the United States to deter a PLA attack on Taiwan today than it was a quarter of a century ago. And it is certainly much harder for the United States to deter China from coercing Taiwan. Yet if Taiwanese and American deterrence of China has failed, and China is at war with Taiwan, Washington may very well decide to commit to a limited conventional war against China. (Strategic ambiguity raises questions about the time, place, nature and probability of an American response. But these questions don’t allow us to conclude that if China attacks Taiwan, the US won’t get involved in a fighting war). Notwithstanding China’s ability to put American forces at risk, American attacks on PLA force elements could have a devastating effect on China’s military options as the crisis escalates. Some of these measures could be undertaken from a distance: the United States could hold PLA mainland targets at risk even if China had a momentary advantage around Taiwan. And if China initially held the upper hand, Washington might have extra reasons to put mainland PLA targets at risk. If the United States pursued some of the conventional military steps implied earlier and degraded China’s military by attacking PLA forces situated on the mainland, (including through attacks on missile bases and command systems), then China would face a deteriorating correlation of forces. China’s sense of vulnerability will be much greater than America’s. There is more than a passing possibility that Beijing would feel its time for making choices that mattered was closing in. Perhaps in anticipation of these American measures, the Communist Party leadership may have already decided that it is time to use “all options are on the table” language, hinting at nuclear possibilities. Hinting is about as far as things might go. Writing over a decade ago, admittedly when the distribution of military power was more strongly in America’s favour, Baohui Zhang suggested that “the possibility of China threatening first use of nuclear weapons should not be ruled out when a real crisis in the Taiwan Strait makes U.S. military intervention seemingly unavoidable,”[41] which also reminds us that there is a difference between issuing a threat and carrying it out. But once those American precision attacks have begun (and China’s conventional and nuclear deterrence has failed to prevent such an intervention) the situation changes. If China’s options to manage and escalate the conventional conflict seem to be getting scarcer because of the effects of American strikes – actual as well as anticipated – what remaining choices will Beijing have aside from crossing the nuclear threshold and putting an end once and for all to its no first use declaratory policy? This runs against the assessment that “there is no evidence that China envisages using nuclear weapons first to gain a military advantage by destroying U.S. conventional forces or to gain a coercive advantage by demonstrating its greater resolve in a conflict with the United States.”[42] But this envisaging has not been occurring when China is losing a conventional war against the United States. And surely the possible targets for a nuclear attack by China would not be confined to the Strait, unraveling any remaining sense of a tacit agreement to limit the geographical confines of the conflict. Would Beijing consider nuclear attacks on US territories in the wider region – including Guam – if it really wanted to exercise some measure of intra-war deterrence (to make the costs of continuing too great for Washington to handle?) Would it want to hold hostage cities and other targets in the Pacific coast of the US mainland? The hostage-taking scenario may seem farfetched. But if China judged that America’s conventional attacks were sufficiently damaging to warrant the use of nuclear weapons, it would then be obliged to think ahead to what sort of American retaliation would ensue. Any such thinking would be bound to focus minds on the very significant asymmetry between China’s and America’s nuclear forces, and the absence of nuclear options on Beijing’s part that might communicate intentions of fighting a limited nuclear war[43] (however preposterous that notion sounds). But should escalation dominance in such a situation be judged by capability and doctrine (which would favour the United States) or by desperation (which might favour China)? At this point there is also an obligation to consider whether the United States might be the first of the two nuclear-armed states in this crisis to use nuclear weapons. There is the decades-old precedent of US nuclear threats against China in a Taiwan Strait crisis (which occurred several years before China itself had a nuclear arsenal). But the mid-1950s were the era of massive retaliation strategies, and America’s nuclear weapons were not used. And more than half a century later, United States decision-makers would also have some confidence that many of their military objectives – including knocking out PLA systems on the mainland – could be achieved by using advanced conventional systems (eg conventionally armed cruise missiles launched from offshore). Moreover, while some US attacking options would be vulnerable to China’s pressure (including forces based in regional bases) the United States would retain long-range options (including bombers) that would be very hard for the PLA to reach. But we need to ask whether the United States would use nuclear weapons first in a Taiwan Strait conflict if the conventional phase of that war was heading strongly in China’s favour? In other words, if it looked like China had a good prospect of turning military outcomes in the Strait into a political victory: unification by force. Taiwan’s future could head in almost any direction, including forceful absorption into China, without any obvious direct threat to America’s own survival. Yet Taiwan’s absorption would imply that Washington had been defeated by China in East Asia. America’s reputation amongst regional allies which depend on it (eg Japan and Korea) would have been seriously affected. Japan’s own security, including against fears of being trapped alongside a triumphant China, would be imperiled by the PLA’s ongoing presence in a Beijing-controlled Taiwan. The temptation for nuclear proliferation in East Asia after America’s failure to protect the interests of its allies would be strong. America’s national security policymakers might argue that despite the enormous costs of using nuclear weapons, (and the moral opprobrium that would follow) at stake in choosing not to use them was the future of the East Asian equilibrium on which many United States vital interests depend. What then of the less deliberate side of the nuclear ledger? Here I do not have in mind an entirely accidental nuclear war – one in which no obvious decision to proceed with hostile acts was involved. Instead there are risks in any close military-technical and doctrinal interdependence between the conventional and nuclear forces of participants in what begins as a limited war in the Taiwan Strait. The question here is a simple one about a complex situation: can either of the two sides (and especially the United States) put at risk the conventional forces of the other side (and especially China’s) without also endangering the target country’s nuclear forces? Endangering nuclear forces is not necessarily restricted to attacks on delivery systems and warheads – eg the nuclear armed variants of the PLA rocket forces. Also crucial are the command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaisance systems for these nuclear forces, without which their delivery to target may be compromised or prevented. At stake here is China’s confidence that it retains nuclear options in the event of a significant American conventional attack and America’s confidence that it can attack China’s conventional capabilities without unintentionally putting at risk China’s nuclear forces, creating more use them or lose them choices for the adversary. This problem is not confined to considerations of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. The late Desmond Ball and I argued a few years ago that any colocation of the PLA’s conventional and nuclear systems could create significant escalatory hazards in a conventional war between China and Japan which brought in the United States as Japan’s security guarantor.[44] Similar risks would be in play should some of the same mainland missile bases that China would use in conducting attacks against Taiwan allow for nuclear as well as conventional options. David Logan argues that while some of these comingling problems have been overstated and others remedied by China’s military reforms, still more may be emerging.[45] P.W. Singer and Ma Xiu have noted that while it was assumed that “the PLA was at least separating its nuclear and conventional forces into distinct and geographically discrete brigades” the deployment of the intermediate range DF26 missile with both conventional and nuclear payloads portends a new and worrying point of instability.[46] If the very same missile offers nuclear as well as conventional options to China, the inadvertent escalation problem raises its dangerous head. In a thoughtful exploration, Talmadge suggests that in the event the United States attacked the capabilities that China was most likely to use in a missile bombardment across the Strait, China’s leaders would still retain some of their most significant nuclear options (and the command and control systems that would permit their use).[47] What matters less, she argues, are the technical interconnections. What matters more is whether China’s leaders believe (wrongly or rightly) that the United States had decided on a counterforce mission, (conventional or nuclear) designed to disarm China. And this version of the nuclear temptation will grow for China’s leaders, “as more and more of their conventional and nuclear or nuclear-relevant assets come under threat during a conventional war.”[48] It needs hardly to be said that putting assets under threat is part of the modern American military philosophy. This would extend to targeting China’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, vital to PLA missile systems (and so reducing the threat to US forces) but also crucial to China’s ability to know what was going on.