ABSTRACT
The small border war between the Soviet Union and China that took place in 1969 reportedly brought the Cold War to an almost forgotten equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet, happening far from civilization, at an unpopulated border between two secretive regimes that have so far kept much of their valuable historical data locked in the archives, the events mostly avoided larger scholarly attention; a striking contrast to the 1962 crisis at the Caribbean that is now one of the most carefully examined single events in nuclear history. The few researchers who studied the crisis, which allegedly made leaders in Moscow consider striking at the young Chinese nuclear arsenal, struggle with a lack of available archival sources. To make matters even more problematic, more is known about Beijing’s fears of the Soviet strike than about Moscow’s actual planning. The lack of evidence makes it even possible that the Soviet nuclear threats were only an elaborate bluff. Yet the importance of this case for the theory more than justifies studying it, even under imperfect conditions. In 1969, the Chinese nuclear arsenal was small, unsophisticated yet surely existing. That makes the crisis one of the few that can reveal observable mechanisms of nuclear deterrence between the small and the big. With such a small number of empirically available cases, students of nuclear deterrence cannot be too picky in their case selection.
