New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

by David E. Sanger

Of all the military developments in China that American officials had worried about over the previous few years—cruise missiles and satellite killers and threatening sorties around Taiwan—new nuclear weapons had not ranked among them. Mao Zedong had always taken a moral-high-ground pride in designing China’s “minimum deterrent” strategy, which held that a few hundred nuclear weapons was all Beijing needed to deter an attack from larger powers. While the United States had briefly considered attacking China’s nuclear test facilities in 1964 (perhaps with Soviet help), in the end it decided to learn to live with the Chinese Bomb. After all, even by the double standards of the West’s nuclear calculus—in which Western powers with nuclear weapons are fine and everyone else a mortal threat—it seemed hard to complain about a few hundred Chinese nuclear weapons when the United States and Russia both maintained deployed arsenals five times larger, not including thousands more weapons that Washington and Moscow kept in storage.