Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
A second possible attack scenario might have consisted of only a nuclear strike against facilities housing the Chinese nuclear weapons program with no invasion of Manchuria. China tested their first nuclear weapons in 1964 and carried out their first underground nuclear test in 1969. Their nuclear weapons were probably not ready to be used in any confrontation with the Soviets. However, the Soviets were not sure that this was the case.
One big unanswered questions was whether or not the Soviets would have struck the very seat of the Chinese government in Beijing. One Soviet missile with a 2.3 megaton thermonuclear warhead would have totally destroyed Beijing and killed over half of the 7.6 million people who lived there.
If the Soviets had clashed with the Chinese in a ground war, their modernized army would have made short work of the poorly equipped Chinese infantry and their obsolete tanks. On the other hand, the world would have been shocked and outraged by any nuclear attack and would have harshly condemned the Soviet Union. In any case, the Chinese leadership would have thought nothing of sacrificing millions of Chinese troops and peasants against the Soviet invaders. The Soviets realized that if they invaded China, there would have been a long and exhausting war with no definite ending like their later invasion of Afghanistan.
Another important consideration for the Soviets was the impact that a Chinese war would have had on the Soviet strategic position in Europe. The Soviets would have had to pull tank divisions from bases in the Warsaw Pact nations and western Russia. Protestors against Soviet power in Eastern Europe in such countries as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary would have probably eagerly welcomed the chance to rebel.
China would gain nothing from taking on a country with superiority in conventional weapons and nuclear weapons. It would have been impossible for the Soviets to invade and conquer a country the size of China but China had no way in which to win such a conflict. If the Soviets invaded and occupied Manchuria after nuking Beijing, it would have devastated China and thrown their development back decades. They would have recovered eventually and would probably regained Manchuria from the Soviets or Russians but at great expense and with great human suffering.
If the tensions between the Soviets and China had not been resolved without a major war, the history of the world for the following decades would have been very different. It is likely that the Soviet Union would have collapsed much earlier than it did, especially if the Soviet Union lost control of countries in eastern Europe much earlier than they did. Embroiled in a major war in the East, Soviet influence in Europe would have been much diminished. The development of the European Union might have been slowed without the threat of the Soviet armies in eastern Europe. The Cold War might have taken a different course depending on the reaction of the U.S. to the Sino-Soviet war. Hopefully, the rest of the nations of the world would have stayed out of the fight and there would not have been another World War.
Zhenbao (Damansky) Island:
