"Who's Daddy" in the Taiwan Strait? The Offshore Islands Crisis of 1958

Abstract

The offshore islands crisis of 1958 found the United States caught in a trap. The military buildup by the People's Republic of China (PRC) on its Fujian coast (opposite Taiwan) and its shelling of Quemoy on 23 August seemed to many in the United States to herald an invasion of the offshore islands. With one-third of the army of the Republic of China (ROC) deployed in Quemoy and Matsu, the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided that it could not back down before a Communist threat and committed itself to the defense of these islands. American plans for the defense of the offshore islands called for the use of nuclear weapons against targets in mainland China. But domestic and international opinion strongly opposed a nuclear war in defense of the tiny islands and forced a change in the U.S. policy. For a time, however, the United States found itself in a crisis that was the closest that it came to using nuclear weapons after Nagasaki. Some scholars have treated this crisis as a case of successful Ameri can deterrence of a Chinese attempt to invade the offshore islands.1 A recent account of this episode that is also an in-depth study of the Chinese side of the crisis treats it as a case of mutual Sino-American deterrence.2 The only study of this crisis based on newly available American documents concentrates on the role of public opinion in moderating U.S. policy in the crisis.3