In an Aug. 18 article headlined “If a China and America War Went Nuclear, Who Would Win?” Britain’s The Economist weekly matter-of-factly discussed the options for nuclear war between the U.S. and China that were gamed by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a neo-con think-tank in Washington which “recently gathered a group of experts to play a tabletop exercise—a type of wargame—to explore how a Sino-American nuclear war could break out. The results were not encouraging,” the magazine reported.
“The line between low-yield tactical nuclear weapons and precision-guided conventional weapons in terms of both their operational effects and perceived impact is blurring,” according to CNAS. But this didn’t increase stability. “The result of all this, in the wargame, was a strange sort of nuclear war: China was incentivized to use nuclear weapons first, despite its formal `No First Use’ pledge, but once it did so, and in contrast with expectations for how a U.S.-Soviet war would have played out in Europe, things did not necessarily spiral into an apocalyptic exchange of strategic nuclear weapons. In the world of nuclear strategists, that is what counts as good news.…
