Sat, Aug 17, 2002 page3

• Academic frets over US backing

  CROSS-STRAIT SCENARIO If China and Taiwan go to war, the US might stand back because it fears Beijing will attack it with nuclear weapons, an American scholar says

  • By Charles Snyder / STAFF REPORTER IN WASHINGTON
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  The US may be incapable of coming to Taiwan's aid against an attack by China any time in the future, even if the US develops the missile defense system President George W. Bush is planning, for fear of Chinese nuclear retaliation, a leading US Taiwan expert has said.

  Washington could not be totally assured of protection against a hit by a Chinese nuclear weapon, and thus would be incapable of committing itself to Taiwan's defense in a major conflict, Michael Swaine of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a recent article published by the Seattle-based National Bureau of Asian Research.

  The analysis is in sharp contrast with Bush's pledge in April last year that the US would do "whatever it took" to help Taiwan defend itself, a pledge reiterated just last week by National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack. It also contradicts what many China specialists and politicians feel would be an inevitable US involvement in any cross-strait conflict.

  "It is extremely hard if not impossible to imagine that any US president would prosecute an expanding conflict against China over Taiwan in the belief that the US homeland has been made entirely safe from a possible Chinese ballistic attack," Swaine wrote in the article, Ballistic Missiles and Missile Defense in Asia.

  "No currently conceivable BMD [ballistic missile defense] system could guarantee total protection against Chinese ballistic missiles, and the stakes involved in such a Taiwan-centered conflict would simply not be high enough for a president to risk the catastrophic damage that would result from even one Chinese missile striking a US city," he wrote.

  China now has between seven and 20 nuclear-capable missiles that can reach the US mainland, Swaine estimates. These missiles, CSS-4/DF-5s and DF-5As, have ranges of 12,000km to 13,000km. US agencies, including the CIA and the Pentagon, put the number of such ICBMs at the upper end of Swaine's range. A CIA report issued in January estimated that the number will swell to between 75 and 100 by the year 2015.

  These missiles, a Cold War legacy, are aimed at assuring that if the US launched a nuclear attack against China, Beijing would be able to launch a counter-attack against US cities -- a variety of the so-called mutually assured destruction theory. But Swaine's report warned that China could use the nuclear weapons in case of a conflict with Taiwan.

  "Some observers," Swaine notes, feel that the modernization of China's long range missile and nuclear force over the next 10 to 15 years "could deter the United States from responding effectively to a regional crisis involving China, such as over Taiwan."

  The US could face a threat from both North Korea and China, which the National Missile Defense system is designed to counter, Swaine notes. Unless such a NMD is "leak-proof," he says. "the United States will be unable to defend Taiwan adequately in a crisis and thereby ensure US credibility."

  Moreover, he says, the effort to deploy an NMD could be "highly destabilizing," and "prompt China to resolve the Taiwan issue by force before a US NMD system can be deployed, or seriously escalate an otherwise containable crisis over Taiwan."

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