US Air Force planned nuclear strike on China over Taiwan

The United States Air Force had considered a plan to drop nuclear bombs on China during a confrontation over Taiwan in 1958 but it was overruled, declassified documents showed Wednesday.

When he learned about it, President Dwight Eisenhower instead required the Air Force 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 Air Force top brass but the author of one of the studies released said US policymakers recognized that atomic strikes had "inherent disadvantages" because of the fall-out danger in the region as well as the risk of nuclear escalation.

The report on the crisis by Bernard Nalty, a then historian with the Air Force, included significant detail on nuclear planning, including an initial plan to drop 10-15 kiloton bombs on 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 report released Wednesday by the National Security Archive.

The body, a non-governmental research institute at George Washington University in Washington, collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the US Freedom of Information Act.

"Of course, if there was a real war who knows what would have happened but there wasn't fortunately," William Burr, senior analyst at the National Security Archive, told AFP.