In the exercise scenario, the year is 2032 and a war against Taiwan has been raging for 45 days. China uses “theater” nuclear weapons – with shorter range and power than the “strategic” missiles that destroy cities – to shorten the war by forcing America to submit. Targets include Guam and Kwajalein Atoll – two islands vital to the US military posture in the Pacific – as well as a US aircraft carrier strike group.

It’s terribly plausible. One reason is the geography of the Asian battlefield. During the Cold War, America and the Soviet Union both planned to use numerous tactical nuclear weapons to destroy large, dispersed troop formations, often near cities. “Today in the Pacific,” the study notes, “naval ships at sea and military air bases on small islands constitute a very different target.” Fewer nuclear weapons would be needed and harm to civilians would be less than during Cold War strikes.

This is linked to a second reason: the evolution of weaponry. Most people believe, not without reason, that conventional weapons are less likely to cause escalation and therefore more usable than nuclear weapons. But today’s low-yield nuclear bombs – 20 kilotons of explosive power, or roughly the size of Hiroshima – can be launched with extreme precision and with less collateral damage. “The boundary between low-power tactical nuclear weapons and conventional precision-guided weapons, both in terms of operational effects and perceived impact, is blurred,” explains the CNAS.

The third factor is the effect of a long war. Within weeks of the start of a conflict, both sides would run out of conventional weapons. Theater nuclear weapons would become more attractive. “Weapon by weapon,” the authors note, “nuclear weapons are more effective at destroying large-scale targets. » Their immense power means they would continue to operate even if weeks of war had degraded the command, control and intelligence systems on which conventional munitions rely.

The result of all this, in the war game, was a strange kind of nuclear war: China was induced to use nuclear weapons first, despite its formal “no first use” commitment, but once that it did, and contrary to expectations of how If a war between the United States and the Soviet Union would have played out in Europe, things would not necessarily have turned into an apocalyptic exchange of strategic nuclear weapons. In the world of nuclear strategists, that’s what counts as good news.

The exercises suggest China had more reason to celebrate. The experts and officials playing China’s role had a wide range of military targets — Asia is teeming with U.S. naval installations and assets. (Although there is little evidence that China currently possesses low-yield nuclear weapons.) The U.S. team, on the other hand, has struggled to come to terms with the fact that many of the most attractive retaliation targets were located on the Chinese mainland. Hitting those with tactical nuclear weapons would carry a much higher risk of escalation to all-out nuclear war.

Additionally, players found that America lacked the weapons needed to hit the “very small number” of low-risk targets – mostly Chinese warships and bases located on contested reefs in the Pacific Ocean. Southern China. America, unlike Russia, no longer has a nuclear-tipped anti-ship missile. A new submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile is planned for the 2030s. But it could not be used to signal China’s use of nuclear weapons. before the fact without revealing its whereabouts, this would also immobilize the rare attack submarines in the middle of a naval war.

Nuclear strategy has its own macabre grammar, steeped in Cold War assumptions and experience and reshaped by evolving military technology. But it comes down to a question of policy. Faced with the nuclear annihilation of 5,000 American sailors aboard an aircraft carrier or a nuclear attack on an American territory like Guam, would an American president respond with nuclear force, would he use what would be a quiver of conventional weapons increasingly restricted – or would it lie down? This, the authors concede, is “the fundamental and unknowable element”.

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