On August 25, President Eisenhower was deep in a bombproof shelter in the North Carolina

mountains when he got the news that Red China was bombarding the island of Quemoy. The

Formosa Straits crisis of 1954-1955 had come back, like a bad dream. Ike was at the time

participating in the federal government’s Operation Alert, an annual drill to evacuate policy

makers from Washington in a simulated nuclear attack. The news from the Far East added a

touch of reality to the exercise. Once again, Eisenhower had to decide how close to bring the

United 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 Red

China’s Chairman Mao. Under the misimpression that Sputnik signaled the superiority of the

Communist 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 prevailing

over the West Wind.” The Soviets were too ashamed of their inferiority to set him straight. That

same November, Mao blustered to Khrushchev that a nuclear war would be a victory for

Marxism. “If worst came to worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain, while

imperialism would be razed to the ground and the world would become socialist.” The Kremlin

leader was dumbfounded. “I looked at him closely,” Khrushchev later recalled. “I couldn’t tell

from his face whether he was joking or not.”

When the United States Marines landed in Lebanon in July 1958, Mao was disappointed with

the Soviet response. He scoffed at Khrushchev’s qualms about setting off a nuclear war. To show

his Kremlin comrades how to deal with the imperialists, Mao ordered Red Chinese forces to

resume shelling the islands of Quemoy and Matsu in August and vowed that Red China would

take the offshore islands—and then invade Formosa.

 Sworn to defend the islands and protect the Nationalist Chinese on Formosa, the Eisenhower

administration uneasily pondered its options. The Joint Chiefs of Staff informed President

Eisenhower, as they had in 1955, that it would be necessary to destroy Chinese airfields on the

mainland with nuclear weapons. Eisenhower was more publicly circumspect than he had been in

the winter of 1955. There was no more loose talk equating atom bombs with bullets. Now that

the 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 to

prepare 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 Ike

seemed to be hedging. In early September, Foster Dulles went to Ike’s summer White House in

Newport to press the president on whether he would be willing to use tactical nuclear weapons

on Chinese airfields. Ike stalled and wandered off into a marginally relevant reminiscence about

D-Day. When it came to nuclear bluffing, Eisenhower followed his own lonely counsel. Tell no

one.

Fortunately, Ike’s bluff worked. Mao was perhaps not as cavalier about nuclear war as he

pretended to be. On September 5, the Communist party chairman told the Supreme State

Conference in Beijing, “I simply did not calculate the world would become so disturbed and

turbulent.” With both sides looking for a way to pull back from the brink, the crisis quickly

wound down. By the end of September, secret diplomacy was working towards a deal. The

Americans were quietly persuading Chiang to reduce his large army (100,000 men) on the
offshore islands. In a near parody of saving face, the Red Chinese announced they would fire on

the nationalist convoys only on odd days of the month—allowing the convoys to sail on the

even-numbered days. In his memoirs, Eisenhower, who had seen almost everything, wrote, “I

wondered if we were in a Gilbert and Sullivan war.”

Yet amidst this absurdity was a victory of sorts: Eisenhower and Dulles had been hoping to

drive a wedge between Russia and China, and the second Quemoy-Matsu Crisis aided this cause.

Khrushchev had promised to provide Mao with a prototype atom bomb. After listening to Mao’s

tirades and watching him goad Uncle Sam, he began to think better of the idea. In 1959, Moscow

told Beijing that no bomb would be forthcoming.