If a China and America war went nuclear, who would win?
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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It is bad enough to contemplate a war in Asia. It is grimmer still to think through a nuclear one.
But somebody has to. And so Andrew Metrick, Philip Sheers and Stacie Pettyjohn, all of the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), a think-tank in Washington, recently gathered a group of experts to play a tabletop exercise—a type of wargame—to explore how a Sino-American nuclear war could break out. The results were not encouraging.
In the exercise scenario, it is 2032 and a war over Taiwan has been raging for 45 days. China uses “theatre" nuclear weapons—with a shorter range and smaller yield than the city-busting “strategic" missiles—to shorten the war by coercing America into submission. The targets include Guam and Kwajalein Atoll—a pair of islands vital to America’s military position in the Pacific—as well as an American aircraft-carrier strike group.
That is distressingly plausible. One reason is the geography of the Asian battlefield. During the cold war America and the Soviet Union both planned to use lots of tactical nuclear weapons to destroy large and dispersed troop formations, often in the vicinity of towns and cities.
“Today in the Pacific", notes the study, “naval vessels at sea and military airbases on small islands are a vastly different target." Fewer nukes would be required and there would be less civilian harm than in cold-war strikes. That is related to a second reason: the evolution of weaponry. Most people, not unreasonably, think of conventional weapons as being less escalatory and thus more usable than nuclear ones.
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