When the Chinese Communist Party shelled Kinmen in 1958, U.S. military generals urged a nuclear attack on the Chinese Communist Party and accepted the risk that the Soviet Union might counterattack and kill millions of people, showing that the Taiwan Strait crisis was more dangerous and the U.S. was more determined to defend Taiwan than the outside world had realized.
“The New York Times reported that Daniel Ellsberg, a 90-year-old former military analyst, disclosed on the Internet a classified part of a top-secret document on the Taiwan Strait crisis, which had only been partially declassified in 1975.
According to the documents, U.S. planners also presumed that the Soviet Union would inevitably come to the aid of the Chinese Communist Party and retaliate with nuclear weapons, but they believed that was a price worth paying for defending Taiwan.
Eitzberg gained notoriety in 1971 when he leaked a highly classified Pentagon study of the Vietnam War, called the Pentagon Papers, to the U.S. media.
Eitzberg told the New York Times that he made copies of the top-secret 1966 Taiwan Strait Crisis study in the early 1970s and decided to disclose it to generate more discussion as tensions rose between the United States and Taiwan.
The author of the top-secret document wrote that if an invasion of Taiwan did occur, General Nathan Twining, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made it clear that the United States would use nuclear weapons against Communist air bases to prevent the PLA from successfully conducting air interdiction operations.
Twining was quoted as saying that if such a move failed to stop the PLA’s aggression, “there would be no choice but to conduct deeper nuclear strikes against the Chinese, as far north as Shanghai.
During the Taiwan Strait crisis, President Dwight D. Eisenhower initially decided to rely on conventional weapons.
The 823 gun battle crisis that erupted in 1958 subsided when the PLA decided to stop shelling the outlying islands under Taiwan’s control.
Washington authorities subsequently recognized Beijing in 1979, but still maintain relations with Taiwan and are its most important military ally.
In recent months, Chinese Air Force planes have frequently intruded and harassed Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), and the United States has frequently operated “freedom of navigation” missions in the waters of the Taiwan Strait.
President Joe Biden is expected to announce his strategy toward the Chinese Communist Party soon, and calls are mounting for him to make a clear public commitment to defend Taiwan with military action.
The U.S. Taiwan Relations Act states that Washington must assist Taiwan in its self-defense, but the U.S. has adopted a policy of “strategic ambiguity” over the past several decades, avoiding explicit statements about the circumstances that would lead to U.S. military involvement on Taiwan’s behalf.
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