The Washington Post reported Thursday (July 1) that China is building 119 intercontinental ballistic missile silos in the desert area near Yumen, Gansu province, which may be designed for the Dongfeng-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, which can carry multiple warheads with a range of up to about 15,000 kilometers and a strike range of up to the U.S. mainland. In fact, historically, the Soviet Union was the one that actually seriously considered a nuclear attack on China.
That said, the Sino-Soviet relationship deteriorated further in 1969 when a military conflict broke out between China and the Soviet Union over Jumbo Island, located in the Heilongjiang River basin, and the Chinese side took effective control of Jumbo Island after the incident. The Soviet military hardliners, led by Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Grechko, Deputy Minister Marshal Cuikov and others, believed at the time that the Soviet Union should use nuclear weapons to “teach” China a lesson, and the Soviet Union secretly contacted the United States and tentatively proposed a destructive strike against Chinese nuclear forces.
However, President Nixon and his staff believed that the greatest threat to the West came from the Soviet Union, and that a Soviet strike on China would inevitably lead to a full-scale Chinese retaliation, which could lead to a worldwide war, so the U.S. quickly made this secret content public.
Mao was shocked to learn that his “big brother” the Soviet Union was considering using nuclear weapons against him, and immediately ordered multiple political and military tactics, including building underground nuclear bomb-proof tunnels in Beijing. In the end, of course, the Soviets did not use nuclear weapons.
In contrast, U.S. nuclear deployments against China have been for defensive purposes. After the Korean War armistice in 1953, the U.S. secretly deployed nuclear weapons at the Tainan Air Force Base in Taiwan in order to continue to deter the PLA from violating Taiwan by force, as the MGM-1 Matador missile, which could carry nuclear warheads.
According to the New York Times, the U.S. also drafted a contingency plan that included a nuclear attack during the Golden Gate gun battle in 1958. The document was unsealed earlier this year, but the section on nuclear attack was still blocked.
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