Abstract:

With the longstanding hostility and suspicion between the U. S. and China since the Cold War, the U. S. government concluded that China' s possession of nuclear weapons would cause a huge threat to its national security and to global strategic interests. A present systematic analysis of the released archival documents from the U. S. shows that the countermeasures of the U. S. towards China' s nuclear capability during that period eventually promoted its policy transition from hostility to acknowledgement in spite of a general limit from the Cold War and a yoke of ideological factors. That proves that the U. S. had to adopt a more realistic and flexible nuclear policy following the development of the international situation.

Key words: military strike, regional containment, strategic nuclear deterrence, strategic triangular relations among the U. S., China and the Soviet Union