At the end of World War II, the victorious Allied powers divided the Korean peninsula at the 38th parallel. The southern portion of Korea was occupied by the United States which established a democratic government. The northern portion of Korea was occupied by Soviet troops and they established a communist government. As the Cold War took hold, hostility grew between the north and the south Korean governments.
In 1949, the communists led by Mao Tse Tung in China toppled the government of Chang Kai Shek and installed a communist government in China. Red China became an uneasy ally to the Soviet Union and the other countries that had been occupied by the Soviet Union after World War II and set up with communist regimes, this included North Korea.
In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. Two weeks into the war, General MacArthur sent a request to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff that they consider whether or not atomic weapons should be made available to the forces fighting on the side of South Korea. At first, the JCS considered giving him 10 to 20 bombs. Then MacArthur started talking about destroying Chinese access to the peninsula and dealing with the Red China and the Soviet Union reaction. The JCS did not want the war to expand and there were not really good targets for atomic bombs in North Korea. They felt that massive firebombing was sufficient to deal with North Korean targets.
The North Koreans drove the South Koreans and their U.N. allies far to the south of the 38th parallel. A U.N. counter offensive drove the North Koreans back beyond the 38th parallel towards the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and Red China. Red China then entered the war against the Korean and U.N. forces in the south and forced them back behind the 38th parallel. The Soviet Union was not directly involved but did supply war materials to North Korea and China. The war ended in 1953 with the 38th parallel as the boundary between the two Koreas.
Following the war, the Red Chinese government pursued the development of nuclear weapons after the crisis of the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954. Uranium and plutonium production facilities were up and running by 1960. The Soviet Union provided advisors and even promised to provide the Chinese with a prototype bomb. However, ideological disputes soured relations between the two communist giants and they finally parted ways in 1961 over their respective interpretations of Marxist doctrine. All Soviet assistance stopped at that point.
The first Red Chinese atomic test took place in 1964 and their first hydrogen bomb test took place in 1967. They have also developed intercontinental ballistic missiles and miniaturized their bombs to create warheads. Their arsenal of a few hundred nuclear bombs is very small compared to nuclear arsenals of the United States and other current nuclear powers.
Chinese nuclear bomb:
