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If a China and America war went nuclear, who would win?
After 45 days of conventional fighting, nukes would be tempting, wargamers suggest.
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Nuclear strategy has its own macabre grammar, steeped in the assumptions and experience of the Cold War and reshaped by the march of military technology.
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The Economist
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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.
