Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is in its seventh day, with Russian President Vladimir Putin showing no signs of watering down his maximalist objective of decapitating the pro-Western Ukrainian government and subsuming the country into his neo-imperial Russian empire, alongside Belarus.
The unprovoked invasion of a European nation outside of NATO’s nuclear-backed defensive umbrella has highlighted the limitations of the Cold War-era doctrine of mutually assured destruction. The notion that the threat of a general nuclear war acts as a deterrent against state-on-state aggression is now in tatters, as is US political scientist Fancis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis.
Putin has demonstrated that a nuclear-armed power can attack a non-nuclear-armed nation with impunity. Nuclear-armed NATO powers the US, UK and France are powerless to intervene directly in the war because they fear escalating the conflict into thermonuclear war with Russia. Indeed, Putin made a coded threat during his speech after authorizing the invasion, intimating that Russia could use its nuclear weapons if a third country were to intervene, and on Sunday announced that he had put Russia’s nuclear deterrent forces on “special alert.”
The irony is that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine held approximately one-third of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, which it was persuaded to give up in 1994 as part of a global nuclear disarmament drive, in exchange for defense guarantees from the West.
Another irony is that Taiwan had a secret nuclear weapons program, called the Hsinchu Project, launched after China conducted its first nuclear test in 1964. Taiwan came close to fabricating a nuclear weapon, but the program was shut down in 1988 under pressure from Washington. As a result, Taiwan has no nuclear deterrent and sits outside the US security umbrella. China, on the other hand, is rapidly modernizing and enlarging its stockpile of nuclear weapons. Late last year, satellite photographs emerged of new nuclear missile silos in western China.
It is possible that Beijing would seek to emulate Putin’s tactics during an invasion of Taiwan, by declaring that any intervention by a third party would constitute an attack on China under the internationally recognized “one China” principle, and would be met with a full-scale nuclear response. Under such a scenario, it would be a brave US president who called Beijing’s bluff and instructed the US Pacific Fleet to sail into the Taiwan Strait.
Taipei and Washington should be under no illusions: Chinese Communist Party leaders are ruthless operators and can be expected to engage in nuclear brinkmanship to deter the US, Japan and others from coming to Taiwan’s aid. Fortunately, there are several options available to Taipei and Washington to counter China’s growing nuclear threat.
First, Taiwan is developing an extended-range version of the medium-range Yun Feng (雲峰, Cloud Peak) surface-to-surface missile. Believed to have a range of more than 2,000km, it would be able to reach Beijing, Shanghai and other major Chinese population centers. This would act as a significant conventional deterrent. The government should explore options to fast-track the program as the world becomes more uncertain and insecure.
Second, Washington could consider deploying US nuclear missiles to Taiwan, as it did in 1958 to deter an attack from China. The US Air Force’s 868th Tactical Missile Squadron operated Martin TM-61 Matador missiles out of Tainan Air Base through to 1962.
The third, and most drastic option, would be for Taiwan to restart its nuclear weapons program, perhaps with assistance from the US.
While further nuclear proliferation is clearly undesirable, the nightmare unfolding in Ukraine should be a wake-up call: It is undeniable that if Ukraine had kept at least a portion of its nuclear deterrent, Putin would never have dared to roll his tanks across its border.
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