Please cite only with permission
Twomey: Lost in Translation, APSA
8/27/03
Page 17
discourage Soviet retaliation in the event of tactical nuclear weapons usage against China.
66
Even in the case of nuclear war, China’s strategy would center upon “drawing American ground
forces into China’s interior.”
67
It is also very clear that nuclear weapons did not receive serious analytical study in China
until much later. Before 1955, there had been no formal study of what atomic weapons could do
against China. In July of that year the top 200 leaders in the CCP received a briefing that was
only 25 pages long covering different aspects of nuclear war, such as what the weapons could do
to cities, to forces in the field, etc.
68
Similarly, the way in which the dangers of nuclear weapons
was extremely simplistic. This was apparent in the discussions held by operational military
commanders late in the Korean War.
69
Summary
Based on all this recounting, the evidence strongly supports a characterization of the two
countries facing each other with very large differences in their theories of military victory.
China and the United States faced each other with vastly different military capabilities and
beliefs about how best to use them. The two sides views on nuclear weapons can only be
described as opposites. The beliefs regarding tactical air and combined arms on the US side and
People’s War on the Chinese side are also far apart. The independent variable here is one of two
very different views about the nature of warfare. The two nations’ theories of victory could
hardly be more distinct.
66
Jian Chen, Mao's China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 71 and
189. Note these discussions occurred in the late 1950s, but there is no reason to believe that Mao softened his
view on the utility of nuclear weapons over time.
67
Ibid., 189.
68
Interview with Shen Zhihua, is one of the only historians of Chinese FP who has access to the Chinese archives.
September 2002.
69
See Zhang, Mao's Military Romanticism, 237-38.
Convention