On August 25, President Eisenhower was deep in a bombproof shelter in the North Carolinamountains when he got the news that Red China was bombarding the island of Quemoy. TheFormosa Straits crisis of 1954-1955 had come back, like a bad dream. Ike was at the timeparticipating in the federal government’s Operation Alert, an annual drill to evacuate policymakers from Washington in a simulated nuclear attack. The news from the Far East added atouch of reality to the exercise. Once again, Eisenhower had to decide how close to bring theUnited States, along with the rest of the world, to the nuclear brink.No national leader talked, or possibly thought, more belligerently about nuclear war than RedChina’s Chairman Mao. Under the misimpression that Sputnik signaled the superiority of theCommunist bloc over the West, on November 18, 1957, he told Chinese students in Moscow that“the international situation has now reached a new turning point…The East Wind is prevailingover the West Wind.” The Soviets were too ashamed of their inferiority to set him straight. Thatsame November, Mao blustered to Khrushchev that a nuclear war would be a victory forMarxism. “If worst came to worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain, whileimperialism would be razed to the ground and the world would become socialist.” The Kremlinleader was dumbfounded. “I looked at him closely,” Khrushchev later recalled. “I couldn’t tellfrom his face whether he was joking or not.”When the United States Marines landed in Lebanon in July 1958, Mao was disappointed withthe Soviet response. He scoffed at Khrushchev’s qualms about setting off a nuclear war. To showhis Kremlin comrades how to deal with the imperialists, Mao ordered Red Chinese forces toresume shelling the islands of Quemoy and Matsu in August and vowed that Red China wouldtake the offshore islands—and then invade Formosa.
Sworn to defend the islands and protect the Nationalist Chinese on Formosa, the Eisenhoweradministration uneasily pondered its options. The Joint Chiefs of Staff informed PresidentEisenhower, as they had in 1955, that it would be necessary to destroy Chinese airfields on themainland with nuclear weapons. Eisenhower was more publicly circumspect than he had been inthe winter of 1955. There was no more loose talk equating atom bombs with bullets. Now thatthe Soviets were developing ICBMs, he had to be more careful in his public utterances.Eisenhower knew that neither the American people nor America’s allies could stand the risk of starting a global war over some small islands off the Chinese coast.As he so often did, Eisenhower chose studied ambiguity. The president told the military toprepare to fight with conventional weapons, but also to be ready to use atom bombs in a worst-case scenario. At a press conference on August 27, Ike made clear that he alone would decide if and when to use those weapons. On Formosa, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek fumed that Ikeseemed to be hedging. In early September, Foster Dulles went to Ike’s summer White House inNewport to press the president on whether he would be willing to use tactical nuclear weaponson Chinese airfields. Ike stalled and wandered off into a marginally relevant reminiscence aboutD-Day. When it came to nuclear bluffing, Eisenhower followed his own lonely counsel.
Tell noone.
Fortunately, Ike’s bluff worked. Mao was perhaps not as cavalier about nuclear war as hepretended to be. On September 5, the Communist party chairman told the Supreme StateConference in Beijing, “I simply did not calculate the world would become so disturbed andturbulent.” With both sides looking for a way to pull back from the brink, the crisis quicklywound down. By the end of September, secret diplomacy was working towards a deal. TheAmericans were quietly persuading Chiang to reduce his large army (100,000 men) on the
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