In a fascinating report, Max Seddon and Chris Cook of the Financial Times reveal how Russia might use nuclear weapons to roll back Chinese aggression. Their story, built off of leaked secret documents, confirms Russia’s deep and longstanding concern that a revitalized China might try to annex Russia’s eastern territories.
Given that China and Russia declared a friendship “without limits,” a few years ago, the prospect of a nuclear exchange between the two neighbors may seem unlikely to a casual Western observer. But Russia is acutely aware that border friendships can change quickly. The last time China and the Soviet Union signed a friendship treaty, the two countries were, within twenty years, embroiled in a nasty border conflict.
China’s actions across Asia has shown the country has a long memory for past slights and long-standing territorial losses. Expansion-minded Chinese nationalists, coupled with China’s increasing contempt for Russian military weakness, are quite capable of harnessing China’s resentments over past defeats to turn on their diminished client state to the north.
Moscow knows this, and it is taking great pains to deter Chinese adventurism. Even with Russia’s Army overextending itself in Ukraine, Russia exercised nuclear-capable Iskander missiles twice last year in “regions bordering China.”
Concrete evidence of Russian plans for a nuclear response to Chinese border aggression reveals the extent of Russia’s concerns that China, in time, may begin staking a claim to Russia’s lightly-populated eastern territories, and reaching out to champion Russia’s long-ignored citizens of Asian descent. Interestingly enough, the report seemed to describe Russia’s nuclear response scenarios as a last-ditch self-defense mechanism, largely targeting Chinese forces after they had entered Russian territory. And that’s grim—such a scenario suggests, at best, that Russia’s European-oriented military elites have few qualms about raining nuclear fallout on Russian citizens of Asian descent.
