have you ever wonder how many nukes uncle sam is reserving for china.
will uncle sam be a dragon slayer or it's sweet and sour tu fu yung.we
shall see...
01/05/2008 The US Air Force considered a plan to drop nuclear bombs
on China during a confrontation over Taiwan in 1958, but was overruled
by then-president Dwight Eisenhower, declassified do***ents showed
Wednesday.
Eisenhower instead ordered military officers to initially use
conventional bombs against Chinese forces if the crisis escalated,
according to previously secret US Air Force history.
The president's instructions seemingly astounded the top Air Force
brass, but the author of a declassified re****t said US policymakers
recognized that atomic strikes had "inherent disadvantages" because of
the danger of radioactive fall-out in the region.
The re****t on the crisis by Bernard Nalty, an Air Force historian at
the time, included details of an initial plan to drop 10 to 15 kiloton
nuclear bombs on Chinese airfields in Amoy (now called Xiamen) in the
event of a Chinese blockade against Taiwan's so-called Offshore
Islands.
"This was in accordance with the drift of Air Force thinking which
considered nuclear weapons as usable as 'iron bombs,'" according to
the re****t, written in June 1968 and released Wednesday by the
National Security Archive.
The Archive, a non-governmental research institute located at the
George Wa****ngton University in the US capital, collects and publishes
declassified do***ents obtained through the US Freedom of Information
Act.
Eisenhower "ordered the Air Force and Navy to prepare for conventional
strikes as a show of determination," Nalty wrote, but "if the conflict
escalated, nuclear strikes could have followed." What led the White
House to change the ground rules was the recognition that atomic
strikes had "inherent disadvantages" - fallout would cause civilian
casualties both in China and on Taiwanese territory, Nalty wrote.
An im****tant lesson from that crisis was that "armed forces must
expect civil authority to impose tight controls on them in times of
emergency," the re****t said.
Taiwan and China split in 1949 at the end of a civil war, but Beijing
still sees the island as part of its territory awaiting reunification,
by force if necessary. The United States, obliged by law to offer
Taiwan a means of self-defense if its security is threatened, is the
leading arms supplier to the island despite switching diplomatic
recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.
CIA chief Michael Hayden said Wednesday that China's rapid military
buildup was "troubling" as "it reinforces long-held concerns about
Chinese intentions towards Taiwan." "But even without that issue, we
*****s the buildup would continue - albeit one that might look
somewhat different," he said in a speech at Kansas State University.
A Pentagon re****t said this year that China had boosted total military
spending in 2007 to more than twice its declared budget but Beijing
dismissed it as an exaggeration, made in order to justify US sales of
military hardware to Taiwan.
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