How to Manage Escalation with Nuclear Adversaries Like China

Chinese leaders fled Beijing in October 1969. A nuclear attack from the Soviet Union seemed imminent. They ordered people to stockpile supplies and prepare for war. They readied their own nuclear weapons for launch. And then they evacuated to make sure they and their government would survive.

They had come to this point, staring down the precipice of nuclear war, through a remarkable series of missteps and miscommunications. Seven months earlier, they had ordered a small ambush of Soviet forces on a disputed island in the middle of nowhere. They had intended to teach the Soviets a “bitter lesson.” It had blown up in their faces.

The crisis of 1969 holds some important lessons for U.S. military planners as they think through how a future war with China could unfold. Once the shooting starts, a recent RAND paper warned, the U.S. would face escalation risks it has not experienced since the Cold War. It needs a theory of victory that explains not just how it plans to win, but how it plans to win without triggering a nuclear war. It needs to account for the same blur of confusion that took China and the Soviet Union to the brink in 1969.

“This would be very, very different from what the vast majority of the U.S. military has ever experienced,” said Jacob Heim, a senior policy researcher at RAND. “The U.S. needs a clear vision of how it can win a war with China without catastrophic escalation.”

The answer, until recently, was pretty straightforward. If the Chinese ever tried to invade Taiwan, the U.S. would meet them with overwhelming force. It would shoot down enough Chinese airplanes, sink enough Chinese ships, that China would have no choice but to back down. In military circles, that's known as denial. The U.S. would deny China any hope of victory.

But China has made that much, much harder. It has built up its military to the point that it's not at all clear it would be the loser in that war. In wargames conducted over the past ten years or so, the Chinese side has not infrequently “cleaned [our] clock,” said former deputy assistant secretary of defense David Ochmanek, now a senior researcher at RAND. And so some U.S. strategists have started to reach for a different approach.

It would seek to impose tremendous costs on China, beyond the Taiwan battlefield. The U.S. could, for example, establish a naval blockade to cut off Chinese trade. It could bomb Chinese factories that are supporting the war effort. It would aim to convince Chinese leaders that the costs of continuing the war are too high, and their best option is to stop fighting.

But for that to work, it would have to navigate what RAND researchers call the Goldilocks challenge. Their recent study, commissioned by the U.S. Department of the Air Force, warned that might not even be possible.

Any costs that the U.S. imposes would have to be high enough that Chinese leaders give up their war aims. But they can't be so high that those leaders risk catastrophic escalation instead—by, for example, sending a missile into a factory on the U.S. mainland. That's the Goldilocks challenge. Too cold, and the Chinese brush it off as the cost of going to war. Too hot, and you might set off a sequence of events that leads closer and closer to nuclear war.

“If you wade into that Goldilocks challenge, there's a serious risk that you're going to get it wrong,” Heim said. “And in the process of trying to find that sweet spot, you're going to create escalation. You're going to broaden the war.”

Which brings this back to the Chinese-Soviet crisis of 1969.

As part of their study, the researchers looked at three historical crises that played out under the shadow of nuclear weapons. One was that 1969 crisis. Another was the Cuban missile crisis. And the third was a standoff between the U.S. and China over Taiwan in the 1990s. The researchers wanted to see how well leaders were able to identify their opponent's red lines and pressure points in real time.

In every case, they found leaders struggling to cut through the fog as dangers multiplied. None came close to solving the Goldilocks challenge.

Decisions were unpredictable. Red lines shifted. During the Cuban missile crisis, for example, President Kennedy approved a plan to strike Soviet air defenses on Cuba if they shot down any U.S. aircraft. Days later, they shot down a U-2 spy plane. But Kennedy decided to step back from his red line, fearing the escalation risks that lay on the other side.

The most consistent feature of the three crises was confusion. Leaders never knew how their actions would be received by the other side—and the other side almost never received their actions as intended.

In 1969, for example, the Chinese only wanted to deter further Soviet activities on an island they considered their own. But their ambush stunned the Soviet Union. It responded with veiled nuclear threats—which the Chinese either missed or ignored. That further bewildered Soviet leaders, who stepped up their threats.

The Chinese eventually became convinced that a nuclear strike was not just possible, but certain. Yet rather than back down, they started digging in for the day after. For several months, both sides stared at each other, refusing to blink, nuclear weapons at the ready, until Chinese and Soviet diplomats could wind back the tensions.

“Does the Goldilocks zone even exist?” asked policy researcher Alexandra Evans. “Is there a zone that you can target? Does it change over time? Can we know what it is before a war begins, and can we have any confidence that we would be able to identify targets in that zone? And the answer, at least in our three case studies, was no.”

The U.S. has not had to seriously consider theories of victory against a nuclear-armed adversary for several decades now. It needs to define one for a potential future war against China, researchers wrote, and then start investing in the capabilities it will need to make it successful. Young officers, especially—the senior leaders of tomorrow—need to think through their options if deterrence and diplomacy ever fail, and the U.S. and China go to war.

Their best option, researchers concluded, continues to be denying China any prospect of victory from the very start. That approach faces severe and growing challenges, no doubt. But the U.S. still has some key advantages. Its submarines and long-range missiles, for example, could make an invasion of Taiwan prohibitively dangerous for China.

Even if Chinese leaders ever do cross that line, “a theory of denial at least gives us an exit ramp,” senior policy researcher Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga said. “It gives us the best chance to see if Beijing will stop fighting after its military campaign fails.”

Researchers have briefed their findings to senior leaders across the Air Force and other military branches. Their conclusions have helped inform recent wargames testing out how a conflict with China might play out. One response the researchers sometimes hear: If we got perfect intelligence, maybe we could solve the Goldilocks challenge.

“The Goldilocks challenge is fundamentally a mystery, not a secret,” Heim said. “It's not like (Chinese President) Xi Jinping has written down in his diary somewhere, 'If I launch this war and the United States strikes this target, then I'll stop.' Xi Jinping doesn't even know how he'd respond in the moment.”