As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, the United States formulated a new military strategy toward China. The guiding ideology of this strategy is based on the theory of limited war, which limits a possible military conflict with China to the level of conventional war, and the bottom line is not to escalate into a nuclear war. There are two elements that underpin this guiding ideology:
The first is that the United States is leading the way in conventional**. The United States believes that it can defeat the PLA with its conventional equipment that is one or two generations ahead.
At the time, the United States enjoyed a huge nuclear advantage over China. Since China has a policy of not being the first to use nuclear weapons, as long as China is defeated in a conventional war, and it is strictly set not to completely defeat the opponent or make the opponent surrender unconditionally as the purpose of the war, China will not use a weak nuclear arsenal against the United States in order to redeem the defeat, and can only accept limited defeat to avoid complete destruction, so as to achieve the goal of controlling the scale of the war.
The guiding ideology of the United States has a special term called controllable -- or controllable escalation of war -- which means that the United States can take the initiative to control the scale of the war and ensure that it does not escalate into a nuclear war. In this guiding ideology, it is very important to ensure that the United States is at least one generation ahead of the PLA in terms of equipment. This gave the United States the confidence to control the scale of the war.
The greater the confidence that the United States can control the scale of the war, the easier it will be to wage war against China or harass it by force. The perverse behaviour in the former Yugoslavia is an act of this faith.
In 2004, *** came to power, and the ** forces inside and outside the island became increasingly rampant. On March 14, 2005, the Third Session of the 10th National People's Congress of China passed the Anti-National Law. After the bill was voted on, the audience applauded thunderously and lasted for more than 10 minutes, declaring their determination to use force if necessary. There are statements from the US side that the US military can defeat the PLA by virtue of its conventional superiority. Major General Zhu Chenghu, then a professor at China's National Defense University, made a famous remark that the United States was preparing for the destruction of 200 cities on the west coast by China's nuclear weapons and that China was preparing for the destruction of the area east of Xi'an by the United States, which caused an uproar in the United States.
Because Zhu Chenghu's remarks imply that we will use nuclear ** after losing a conventional war. The reason given by Zhu Chenghu is that even if there is a war in the Taiwan Strait, it will be a civil war in China, and US intervention is an invasion by a foreign enemy, so China can use atomic bombs against the United States without self-restraint of not being the first to use nuclear weapons. This argument is very witty, and can be seen as a declaration of our reluctance to accept defeat in conventional warfare.
The United States specifically asked whether our official policy of not being the first to use nuclear ** has changed, and the official response has not. However, officials opened China's nuclear command post to visiting US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who succeeded Rumsfeld, also visited a nuclear warfare command post. Why let them visit the command post of the nuclear war?
Deng Jiaxian's wife once recalled that the task completed by Deng Jiaxian before his death was to achieve the means to reach the nuclear limit, which means global destruction. China's nuclear counterattack capability is a matter of national survival, and there is no room for sloppiness. The two U.S. defense secretaries can infer the strength of China's nuclear counterattack from the size of the nuclear warfare command post they have seen, and warn the United States not to cross the threshold of nuclear war and launch a preemptive nuclear attack on China.
ENDS) February** Dynamic Incentive Plan