The atom bomb is a paper tiger with which the American reactionaries try to terrify the people. It looks terrible, but in fact is not. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass annihilation: the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new weapons.1
The emphasis on the people as the ultimate determinant of victory or defeat was the foundation of Maoist doctrine. It emerged out of a series of successful wars against armies that enjoyed better equipment but lacked mass support, and from a leadership imbued with a revolutionary ideology that identified the aroused masses as the source of social change. People’s War involved galvanizing the revolutionary spirit of the masses and using this to military and political effect. The military sphere was at all times subordinate to the political. The main military task was not to hold territory but to gain time for the masses to be mobilized and to bring their weight to bear. At the same time enemy forces were to be depressed and demoralized, never allowed to exploit their advantages in equipment in a pitched battle, but to be drawn into the country, with lines of communication extended. There they would be bogged down in endless skirmishes and eventually drowned in a human sea. Guerrilla tactics were to be employed, at least until the final stages of a war when it would be possible to send a regular army into battle against the weakened forces of the reactionary state. Until that time, the guerrillas would fight at night, with local superiority in manpower, and at as close quarters as possible, to limit the value of the enemy’s material superiority. Mao provided the formula: ‘The enemy advances; we retreat. The enemy halts; we harass. The enemy retreats; we pursue.’2
There was much that any aspiring guerrilla leader could learn from Mao’s experiences in fighting the Japanese invaders and the Kuomintang in the civil war. But the lessons were not universally applicable. They were most relevant to campaigns against unwelcome intruders into well-populated agrarian societies where the terrain afforded maximum cover for guerrillas and maximum difficulty for a conventional army. In sparsely populated and open areas, or where there were fixed strategic and industrial assets that required attention, different tactics were required. The professional military were aware of the limitations of People’s War, but after Mao’s victory against the Nationalists they rarely found it possible to give voice to their apprehensions. They preferred to lay less stress on political consciousness and more on equipment, wishing far more freedom of manoeuvre than being confined to either ‘human wave’ tactics or harassment of the enemy by the lack of modern means of warfare. The frustration was summed up by Marshal Peng Dehuai: ‘What’s the use of relying entirely on political and ideological work? It can’t fly.’ But then he was disgraced in 1959 for such retrograde thoughts.
The generals were not permitted to develop their forces along conventional lines, nor lay down, as did their colleagues in the Soviet Union, the essentials of strategic doctrine. These matters were at the centre of political argument and, as the Maoist faction asserted itself against internal opponents and then against the ‘Khrushchev Revisionists’ in the Soviet Union, People’s War became a dogma. Adherence to it became the touchstone of political reliability while it was presented in an ever more exaggerated form. By the time of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s it had been simplified into a blanket assertion that the masses, relying on their own devices but inspired by the Thoughts of Mao Zedong, could achieve virtually anything against almost any odds. Mao’s Defence Minister, Lin Biao, outlined the most uncompromising and all-embracing version of this doctrine in September 1965: ‘The spiritual atomic bomb which the revolutionary people possess is a far more powerful and useful weapon than the physical atomic bomb.’3
In both the moderate and extreme versions of People’s War the response to the atom bomb was the same: it had to be assessed in terms of the effect on morale of the guerrilla army and those masses in the process of being mobilized. In Soviet propaganda, Mao’s response to the atom bomb was a desperate attempt to preserve an obsolescent doctrine by contemplating the deaths of millions of his countrymen. It was true that on occasion Mao and his followers did suggest that little would be gained by the enemy destroying hundreds of millions of Chinese because equivalent numbers would still be around to carry on the fight, but it was never suggested that these deaths would be a matter of no consequence. Nor was the disparagement of the bomb an attempt to maintain some abstract doctrinal purity. No country had been closer to nuclear attack than the Chinese since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed. Direct military confrontation came with the Americans in Korea and was close many other times in the 1950s—over Indochina and Taiwan. Later on it was feared that the Vietnam War would spill over into China. Then the hostility with the Soviet Union approached full-scale war in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There is evidence that nuclear use was actively considered during a number of these crises. The Chinese displayed a remarkable talent for picking arguments with the superpowers and so the possibility of becoming a nuclear victim was a real one.
The Maoist view was that the destructiveness of nuclear weapons ought not to be exaggerated lest the masses be demoralized. The view was best expressed through the metaphor of the ‘paper tiger’—‘outwardly strong, but inwardly feeble’. The aim of the concept was to break down the superstition that left people intimidated by nuclear threats, by pointing out how the fear of retaliation or the pressures of world opinion meant that it was unlikely that nuclear weapons would be used; how inappropriate these weapons would be in guerrilla warfare; how even after nuclear attacks the country still need not succumb to a conqueror because the basic method of People’s War would still be applicable; and how, even if a nuclear weapon exploded in the vicinity, no harm would come to those that had taken the proper precautions. The essence of the concept was that the paper tiger could not, in the end, triumph. This did not mean, however, that its real qualities should be ignored, for in combat it was a ‘real’ or ‘iron’ tiger. The point was to despise the enemy strategically but respect him tactically.4
When you can get into a well-constructed air-raid shelter before the release of the bomb and put on a suit of white clothing and make sure to get to a place ten kilometres away immediately after the explosion, nothing shall happen to you. Look at myself. … I have gone through the explosion of an atomic bomb and I am still growing strong as before. The atom bomb is in fact not as dreadful as American imperialism points it out to be.
The atomic bomb is no longer monopolized by the US. The Soviet Union has it too. If the US dares to use the atomic bomb she naturally will get the retaliation deserved. …
The atomic bomb itself cannot be the decisive factor in a war. … It cannot be employed on the battlefield to destroy directly the fighting power of the opposing army in order not to annihilate the users themselves. It can only be used against a big and concentrated object like a big armament industry centre or huge concentration of troops. Therefore, the more extensive the opponents’ territory is and the more scattered the opponent’s population is, the less effective will the atomic bomb be.
A ‘resist America’ drive began in late October 1950, which attempted to reassure the audience both about the improbability of employment of atomic bombs and their limited effects should they be used.5
These arguments were not only unrealistic, and rapidly becoming more so, but somewhat premature when related to the deterrent effect of the Soviet bomb. Nevertheless, refined gradually, these practical arguments on the lack of utility of nuclear weapons were repeated over the following years, at least for domestic public and international consumption.
This mixture of insight and credulity was illustrated by the evolution of views on the Soviet nuclear force. The first Soviet detonation of 1949 was welcomed for its deterrent effect, but the Chinese leaders took time to appreciate the full meaning of the nuclear age. By the mid-1950s the importance of the American nuclear force as an explanation for the caution in Soviet foreign policy was beginning to be recognized, as were some of the trends in Soviet strategic thinking, particularly with regard to the possible role of surprise attacks. Despite the public rhetoric, in private, the importance of nuclear weapons, and Mao’s recognition that China might want to acquire them, led him to explore this possibility. He raised the issue with Khrushchev in October 1954, but at this point, the Soviet leader was only willing to assist with supporting a civilian atomic energy program.6 Following the Soviet rejection, in January 1955, Mao discussed the prospect of a Chinese atomic bomb with some of China’s leading scientists, and then ordered a weapons programme to get underway.
Actual acquisition of the bomb would take nearly a decade. In the meantime, Chinese leaders were obliged to continue as they had before. In October 1957, with the launching of Sputnik I, the Chinese shared the Soviet pride in the spectacular achievement but drew somewhat more optimistic conclusions than their comrades in Moscow. Mao proclaimed the ascendance of the Socialist Camp over the Imperialist Camp in a lyrical manner: ‘At present, it is not the west wind which is prevailing over the east wind, but the east wind prevailing over the west wind.’
The conclusion that the Chinese drew from this happy turn of events was that the United States was no longer in a position to use its nuclear arsenal to blackmail or intimidate socialism. An argument was developed which matched the fears of the Western critics of massive retaliation—the neutralizing of American nuclear superiority created opportunities for communist advance through wars of limited violence but large political effect, such as those of ‘national liberation’. More specifically, the moment might be ripe to finish the business of the civil war and remove the Chinese Nationalists from their stronghold on Taiwan.
On 23 August 1958, Chinese batteries began a bombardment of Quemoy, one of the smaller islands close to the mainland held by the Nationalists. Moscow was caught off guard by the Chinese shelling. This exacerbated Khrushchev’s fears about Chinese irresponsibility. A month and a half later the shelling was effectively halted. Other than that there was no military action. The Chinese intention was to probe the extent of American support for the Nationalists. If this was found to be less than complete, the offshore islands would probably have been seized as a prelude to the liberation of Taiwan. The Americans made it quite clear that they would not accede to any change in the status quo and so the Chinese let matters drop. They found the firm American stance unsurprising. Less satisfactory were the limits on Soviet support for their aspirations which became clear during the crisis. The Russians had a largely defensive view of matters: they were pleased that the Americans kept the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek on a tight leash and refused to countenance any ideas of ‘rolling-back’ communist power on the mainland. What they wished to avoid was actions that might provoke US military intervention, particularly of the sort that might involve nuclear weapons and draw the Soviet Union into a major confrontation.
It was only after the shelling had stopped and the crisis had subsided that serious Soviet warnings were issued to the United States, and even then they were soon qualified. On 7 September Khrushchev wrote to President Eisenhower ‘An attack on the Chinese People’s Republic, which is a great ally, friend and neighbour of our country, is an attack on the Soviet Union.’ This suggested an automatic Soviet response to any attack on China, but then comments appeared suggesting something more conditional. Aid would be ‘considered’ and ‘offered as necessary’, with reminders that the Chinese had grown sufficiently strong to have ‘everything necessary to give a suitable rebuff’ to an aggressor. It was only on 19 September, when the danger of a serious confrontation had clearly passed, that a nuclear threat was invoked, with a warning that any use of nuclear weapons against the mainland would ‘receive a fitting rebuff by the same means’.7
At that time Khrushchev was still attempting to push Mao away from nuclear acquisition, suggesting that China should remain content under the Soviet nuclear umbrella. In 1957, limited nuclear assistance was provided but in practice this amounted to a token effort relative to Chinese aspirations. Sino-Soviet differences were exacerbated as the Russians became suspicious of Chinese recklessness, while the Chinese reacted against Russian attempts to keep them dependent. Moscow observed that the Chinese Communist Party had ‘developed some kind of special aims and interests which the socialist camp cannot support with its military force’. Beijing took the hint: ‘in fighting imperialist aggression and defending its security, each socialist country has to rely in the first place on its own defence capability and then—and only then—on assistance from fraternal countries and the people of the world’.8 The strategic arguments turned on the probability of any armed clash between the socialist and imperialist camps being kept localized, without all-out nuclear exchanges, and on the possibility of a meaningful victory even if the war did become nuclear. The Soviets charged the Chinese with a lack of realism about the effects of nuclear war, pointing out that ‘the atom bomb does not adhere to the class principle’. Beijing’s unfailing optimism on the inevitable triumph of the politically righteous was mocked: ‘It is absurd to suppose that a war of attrition will, as it were, favour the weak and harm the strong. In such a war, the weak will be exhausted before the strong.’9 Chinese pronouncements became more dogmatic, though this did not mean that they were reckless. Military risks were calculated with great care and Mao was not inclined to underestimate the strength of the enemy. Chinese arguments denying the inevitable escalation of any armed clashes into a nuclear war were perfectly cogent.
You can no longer calculate the alignment of forces on the basis of who has the most men. Back in the days when a dispute was settled with fists or bayonets, it made a difference who had the most men and the most bayonets on each side. Then when the machine gun appeared, the side with more troops no longer necessarily had the advantage. And now with the atomic bomb, the number of troops on each side makes practically no difference to the alignment of real power and the outcome of a war. The more troops on a side, the more bomb fodder.
In 1962, by which time relations had become even less cordial, Khrushchev discovered to his fury that the military had been reprinting Mao’s works on warfare. This he considered ‘absurd’: ‘The Soviet Army crushed the crack forces of the German army, while Mao Zedong’s men have spent between twenty and twenty-five years poking each other in the backsides with knives and bayonets’.10 One of the few significant changes between the first (1962) and second (1963) editions of Marshal Sokolovsky’s major work on Military Strategy was that all positive references to the Chinese were expunged.
The first open split between Beijing and Moscow took place in 1960 and the arguments became more heated over 1961 and 1962. Mao was annoyed that Khrushchev had boasted about Soviet technological and military strength yet refused to use it to support China’s aspirations. The Chinese claimed that they needed to look after their own security as they could not rely anymore on the Soviet Union to do it for them. China even went to war with India in 1962, a country with which Moscow tried to have cordial relations. Mao expected support out of class solidarity.11 The war with India came during the Cuban missile crisis, in which Beijing backed Moscow. For a while Moscow reciprocated and gave support to China’s claim against India. When Khrushchev backed down China’s suspicions of the Soviet leadership were vindicated and reinforced. First Khrushchev had shipped the missiles to Cuba (adventurism) and then failed to cope with US nuclear blackmail (capitulation).12
The dispute was not just about the nuclear programme. The Chinese claimed to be working within the same philosophical framework as the Soviet Union, and Mao Zedong was presented as a major Marxist theorist in his own right as well as being a strategist with successful campaigns to his credit. They made claims on Soviet resources and, most sensitive of all, some Soviet territory adjacent to China which Beijing insisted had been taken illegally in Tsarist days. By mounting their challenge from the left, the Chinese chose to contrast a revolutionary fervour and purity with the timidity of a Moscow suffering from excessive bureaucracy. An ideological summit meeting in July 1963 ended in insults and the evident collapse of the relationship between the two communist giants.13
The first Chinese atomic test was in October 1964. After this the paper tiger theme was played down, with the claim that the positive effect of the Chinese bomb on the morale of the revolutionary people made it a ‘real tiger’. And yet, there was no deviation from the previous beliefs in the limited utility of nuclear weapons.14 Official publications continued to reaffirm Mao’s ideas on People’s War.15 During the early phase of the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, nuclear weapons development was badly disrupted, with ‘Red Guards’ confronting military units and scientists involved with the programme. China did not move beyond the most modest objectives for its nuclear force, offering no nuclear guarantees to others. In July 1966 it established the Second Artillery as the country’s nuclear force and over the next years developed suitably modest capabilities. Due to technological limitations, Chinese missiles were, at first, mainly oriented towards Soviet cities.
The relatively small numbers of nuclear weapons developed and the emphasis on survivability had given China a ‘minimum deterrent’, even if Chinese leaders did not officially conceive of it in such terms, at least initially. This would have contradicted Mao’s contention that nuclear weapons had no ‘special power to deter a nuclear attack or dominate the battlefield’.16 Even by the end of the 1970s, it was not a force which met the full requirements of a second-strike capability, with many questions still remaining about the survivability of its nuclear forces. This demonstrated that a country burdened by enormous resource constraints could not allow itself the luxury of meeting the exacting standards for deterrence applied by the US, even though its relations with the USSR by this time were much more precarious. Meanwhile, from about 1960, China began significant work on civil defences; a programme that peaked in the late 1960s-early 1970s amidst the Vietnam War and the border clashes with the Soviet Union. Foreign visitors were deliberately taken to Chinese shelter complexes to impress upon them that the country could survive a nuclear war and defend against an invasion.17
With the defeat of the leftist ‘Gang of Four’ in the mid-1970s after Mao’s death, the new leadership dropped the more mystical elements of ‘People’s War’ theory. Military leaders, allowed to spend more time on professional responsibilities and less on raising political consciousness or administering the country, began to consider the serious difficulties connected with waging a conventional war on and around China’s borders.18 This sort of limited campaign was a more likely contingency than that of an invader attempting to conquer the country. It required not so much a vast patriotic militia, but a more traditional sort of force, capable of fighting ‘under modern conditions’.19
For both the United States and the Soviet Union the rise of the Peoples’ Republic of China as a great power in its own right represented the most important geopolitical development of the early 1960s. China, a country for whom the United States had long had a soft spot was a difficult issue for Kennedy because of the presumed responsibility of Democrats and a tepid diplomacy for its ‘loss’ to Communism in 1949 and the residual responsibility for the rump Nationalist state that had been set up in Taiwan as the Republic of China under the leadership of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. During the 1950s there had been a vague hope that when China finally came round to its senses the two could join together against Russia. Instead the Chinese sniped at both superpowers from the sidelines, devastated their economy and society with the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and encouraged militancy everywhere. Once it had its own nuclear weapons there seemed to Kennedy to be no limit to the mischief it might cause.
Claims have been made that Kennedy and later Johnson considered a pre-emptive attack against China.20 This does not seem to have been taken very far. In January 1963 Bundy reported President Kennedy’s concern about the impact of a Chinese nuclear capability on world politics and whether this might reach a point ‘unacceptable to us’. Bundy stated ‘the President felt that this was possibly the most serious problem facing the world today’. He also said that it might become necessary ‘to take some form of action unless they agreed to desist from further efforts in this field’.21 It was hard to see how a nuclear capability would make the Chinese more militant than was already the case. The most compelling evidence of Kennedy’s concern was his instructions to Averill Harriman in Moscow in July 1963 when he was negotiating the test ban. After observing that ‘relatively small forces in hands of people like CHICOMS [Chinese Communists] could be very dangerous to us all’ he urged Harriman to ‘try to elicit Khrushchev’s view of means of limiting or preventing Chinese nuclear development and his willingness either to take Soviet action or to accept US action aimed in this direction.’22 But there is no suggestion that this went beyond information gathering and was not about setting up a conspiracy with the Soviets. When Harriman did get the chance to talk to Khrushchev alone about China the Soviet leader was not forthcoming.23 Khrushchev might have hoped that a prohibition on atmospheric testing would help frustrate a Chinese nuclear programme,24 but by this time he doubted that a Chinese bomb could be stopped. His main worry about Beijing was that its militancy and recklessness would lead to a wider war. An internal US analysis concluded that a Chinese bomb ‘would heighten already existing issues rather than pose wholly new problems.’ It would still be deterred by the much larger US force. A ‘pre-emptive counter-force strike’ was ruled out. The question of how to ‘strangle the baby in the cradle’ was discussed but there was no great incentive to try.25 Just before the first Chinese tests a State Department study described the Chinese capability as being largely deterrent in purpose and strongly opposed pre-emption.26
When, in September 1967, McNamara authorized the construction of a light ABM system to be in place for when the first few Chinese ICBMs were expected to be operational, there were suggestions that taking on the Chinese was politically more expedient domestically than taking on the Russians. But in itself the idea of countering a Chinese ‘threat’ did not seem outrageous. The US managed to get over its sinophobia quicker than did the Soviet Union. China, for her part, grew weary of calling for a plague on both super-power houses and opted for a rapprochement with the more distant enemy, the US. Ironically, a process that began with the Chinese urging the Soviets to be more militant in their dealings with America ended with a Sino-American accommodation—and the Chinese urging the Americans to be more militant with the Soviets.
The growing Sino-Soviet antagonism culminated in the war scare between the two countries of 1969. Its origins could be traced back to four years earlier when the Soviets initiated a gradual military build-up in the Far East. Whereas in the early 1960s the Soviets only maintained some fifteen divisions near the Chinese border, a decade later the presence had nearly tripled. And with this large increase in Soviet military power in the region, China was forced to confront the possibility of defending against a Soviet invasion.27 At the start of 1968 Soviet armoured vehicles attacked Chinese working on Qiliqin Island in the Ussuri River. After that the border was quiet until the end of the year. Then the Soviets initiated a series of incidents on Zhenbao Island, which was soon followed by a Chinese ambush of Russian soldiers.28 Mao stepped up the polemics but did not take any more action. He apparently saw the tension as a helpful contribution to the fervour of the Cultural Revolution. By this point, however, the Soviet leadership had become sufficiently concerned to begin preparations for a major war against China. There was talk of a pre-emptive nuclear strike before China’s nuclear programme had become fully operational. This in turn alarmed the leadership in Beijing. Nuclear-armed SS-21 missiles, with a range of 500 nm, were deployed by Moscow in the vicinity of China’s north-eastern border. Mao ordered acceleration of the H-bomb programme (the first test was late September 1969), and in October put forces on high alert in response to evidence that the Soviets had done the same.29 Consideration was given to evacuating the capital and telling Russian nationals to return home. In the event an opportunity arose for talks at a senior level at the funeral of the Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, and the immediate crisis was defused.
Nevertheless, over the longer-term, the prospect of conflict with China persisted. For the Soviets, the China threat posed the problem of a two-front war. One scenario, reflected in their wargames, was of an opportunistic NATO taking advantage of a Sino-Soviet conflict or China taking advantage of a NATO-Warsaw Pact clash. Even if NATO and China did not coordinate their efforts, were the Soviets ever to become embroiled in war on one front, this might then create opportunities for an enemy to exploit on the other front.30