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?
The US has this psychotic idea since it got nukes. You stumbled over the most recent incarnation of it. A more retro version was the nuclear beheading strike: Using a small part of the nuclear arsenal to take out the leadership of the target nation to force a surrender before a full scale nuclear exchange. That was the plan against the USSR and currently against Russia(which is one of the reasons why Russia wants any sort of NATO influence gone from Ukraine).
The US always has been batshit insane.