So now we know, officially, that the U.S. military contemplated a nuclear attack on China during the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis. But what few realize is how this then led to a violent slanging match between Beijing and Moscow, which in turn was to lead to the Vietnam and other Indochina wars, which in turn were to lead to far more casualties and damage than could have been inflicted by the planned nuclear attack that U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower fortunately vetoed back in 1958.
I was peripherally involved, working at the time in the East Asia section of Australia's External Affairs Department. We realized the seriousness of the U.S.-China confrontation over the so-called Offshore Islands — islands very close to the Chinese mainland over which Beijing normally would have had legal claim but which the Nationalist government in Taiwan was determined to defend, partly to maintain its own claim to the Chinese mainland.
Beijing's bombardment of the islands, if successful, would have severely damaged Nationalist prestige. The United States was determined not to let that happen, even though just a few years earlier, in 1949, it had tacitly accepted Beijing's claim to Taiwan. (It reversed its position with the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War.)