How did the Communists get Nukes?

We have all heard the rumors about how communist agents that were

Courtesy Wikipedia

--> members of the Oppenheimer group (some say Oppenheimer himself) smuggled nuclear weapons information/plans etc. into the Soviet Union in some misguided sense of a need to maintain a balance of power. Whether there is truth to that rumor is beyond the scope of my research.

However, I want to relate an interesting story about how Mao Zedong secured nuclear weapons for the Communist Chinese.

Courtesy sacu.org

In 1953 Mao Zedong wanted to coerce the Soviets into giving him atomic weapons. He tried to prolong the Korean War as a ploy but that did not work.

His next move was to send Chou En-lai to Moscow with the message that “he must have a war to ‘liberate Taiwan’”[i]. Mao knew that an invasion of Taiwan had little or no chance of success but his point was actually to “push the situation to the brink of nuclear confrontation with America, which would face Russia with the possibility of having to retaliate on China’s behalf unless it let Mao have the Bomb”[ii].

Courtesy PacificWeCare.org

Mao’s artillery barraged Taiwan’s island of Quemoy. US leaders figured Quemoy would be the likely staging area for an invasion of Taiwan, creating the “first Taiwan Strait crisis”[iii]. So they became concerned for the safety of their ally, also known as Nationalist China.

Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev went to China to improve Sino-Soviet relations offering lots of equipment and aid, including a huge loan. Seeing his opening, Mao asked Khrushchev for help to build his own atom bomb. Khrushchev politely advised Mao that nukes were too expensive for China’s economy & that China would be protected “under Russia’s nuclear umbrella”[iv].

Courtesy reformation.org

Encouraged by the Soviet commitment, Mao escalated the situation by attacking more islands in the Taiwan Strait. President Eisenhower (Ike) signed “a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan”[v]. Mao pressed his attacks trying to get Ike to threaten to use nukes against China.

Courtesy WesternJournalism.com

March 16, 1955 (Ides of March) Ike “told a press conference ... he could see no reason that [Nukes] should not be used ‘just as you would use a bullet or anything else’”[vi].

Realizing the US had used nukes in the past, Khrushchev did not want to allow China to drag the USSR into a nuclear war with the US, so he gave nuclear technology to China. 

But Khrushchev was not as gullible as it seems, when you consider that it took China from 1955 to 1964 to actually have a working nuclear bomb. 

Next time a story about how Mao acquired nuclear submarines.

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[i] Jung, C., Halliday, J. (2005). Mao: The unknown story. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 396.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] ibid.

[iv] ibid, p 397.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] ibid.