I recently read this article from John Bellamy foster where he mentions that the US strategists think they can engage in “limited nuclear war”, that is, use nuclear weapons on “tactical” targets and keep nuclear war at a “low” level.
Supposedly, the idea is that the US moves up from low level targets to more important targets, and that at each stage, the Chinese will not escalate because escalation would be top costly for the Chinese (since the Chinese only have ICBMs, their only option of escalation is MAD).
Aparantly, this strategy has also become part of official US doctrine.
My first thought on this is that this strategy is completely insane, because China will not allow it to be played out. If 1 nuke goes off all of them go off.
My second thought on this is that I have no idea what the actual Chinese nuclear policy is, other than their statement to never use nukes in a first strike capacity. Does anybody know of any sources that go into detail on this?
This is not something related to Trump, as the article title suggests. There has been a change in the nuclear doctrine of the US, moving from the “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) to this new doctrine that assumes that tactical nuclear weaponry can be used in a much smaller scope and against strategic targets to avoid escalation into full blown nuclear warfare.
Of course this new doctrine is naive. It assumes all parties in a conflict will remain rational and only use nukes in a particular context. However, it’s very likely that any escalation of nuclear warfare will move to the scenario described in the MAD doctrine.