How hard would China be hit in a 1980s nuclear war?

If full scale nuclear war broke out between the US/USSR in the last two decades of the Cold War, how badly would China be nuked?

How much damage would their population/infrastructure suffer as a result?
 
If they're neutral why would they be nuked?

They'd get hit badly with radiation to be sure, you'd also maybe get collatoral from Vladivostok.
 
Utterly destroyed, and probably hit by both sides. Just like pretty much everyone else. There are tens of thousands of nukes flying, and neither side wants anyone around to help the other guys afterward.
 
If they hadn't, would that stop them from being nuked by either (or both) sides?

Possibly. The existence of "FYT" strikes has never been conclusively confirmed, for what I would think are obvious (diplomatic) reasons, although there is some logic too it. At minimum, I'd say it would reduce the number of nukes tossed their way. Whether it would reduce it enough to matter is an unknown.
 
China is a threat to both sides and neither side will want to see China win by simply not being involved in the war. The Soviet Union will be especially interested in making sure that China is clobbered good and hard. Remember the Golden Horde. As for the United States it will be more of a target of opportunity and after all they are still commies.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Utterly destroyed, and probably hit by both sides. Just like pretty much everyone else. There are tens of thousands of nukes flying, and neither side wants anyone around to help the other guys afterward.
China is a threat to both sides and neither side will want to see China win by simply not being involved in the war. The Soviet Union will be especially interested in making sure that China is clobbered good and hard. Remember the Golden Horde. As for the United States it will be more of a target of opportunity and after all they are still commies.
Because they'd be a threat to the surviving rump USA and/or USSR.
China was a US ally against the Soviets in the 1980s

Not only that but the general impression in the US was that China was liberalizing in the 1980s (which was sort of true), Deng visited the US and wore that six gallon hat on TV. The impression of 1980-1989 PRC wasn't evil commies anymore.
 
This actually presents big problems for the USSR's nuclear strategy - you have to put 1k weapons on China now on top of the 1k you have to put on the USA (China is huge and populated and has a lot of big cities and some of them are missile sinks (you have to put 100 just in the Beijing/Tianjin area, you have to sink a lot into Nanking, Shanghai, etc etc, and then you have the REST of the country to deal with, and this isn't even considering Taiwan).

If the Soviets really had a "nuke anyone that could possibly help the USA" plan it's really not going to work unless they can somehow get their entire inventory targeted and in the air on D-Day, which is not gonna happen.
 
Utterly destroyed, and probably hit by both sides. Just like pretty much everyone else. There are tens of thousands of nukes flying, and neither side wants anyone around to help the other guys afterward.

Really? You are vastly overestimating the damage even a full scale exchange would do. "ten thousands of warheads" sounds like a whole lot,but seems a lot smaller when you realize that there are also thousands of targets in your actual enemy alone,and you need several nukes per target. China might well be hit,hard even,but diverting enough nukes to them to truly cripple them is pretty much letting your actual enemy,the USA/USSR survive.

I won't even commend on "pretty much everyone else".
 
The United States had no treaty of alliance with communist China and Reagan did not like communists in any form. Also once the nukes are flying all the rules change. Finally once the United States is crippled and China was not how do you think the relationship would change. You can bet that both Military and Diplomatic thinkers considered that one. So China would get Nuked by the United States.
 
China is:
  • A threat to both the USSR and USA.
  • A Communist state, but one without close ties to the USSR (they had fought division-scale battles only a few years before!)
  • Conveniently in range of intermediate-range missiles and bombers from both sides, so long-range nuclear forces can be reserved for other targets
  • Conveniently unable to effectively defend itself from said missiles and bombers
Basically, they're going to get pummelled by both sides. I don't know how wrecked they'd be - China is a big place, and there are only so many nukes and delivery systems to go around - but a hundred (or more) strikes of varying sizes doesn't seem impossible, even if some of them are the same place getting hit by both sides.
 
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