As the West gropes for a policy to cope with China's growing power, secret documents from the 1960s reveal that Washington considered sending commandos and even heavy bombers to obliterate Beijing's atomic ambitions.
An until now secret debate under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson reviewed a wide range of pre-emptive military action to prevent Mao Zedong's China from obtaining what a panicked Pentagon study warned would be a capability to "destroy San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Washington".
"It is necessary to face clearly the fact that China will, barring interference, have in a few short years weapons which can destroy much of the United States," said a report by the Office of International Security Affairs at the Department of Defence, "It will be necessary to think in terms of a possible 100 million deaths whenever a serious conflict with China threatens."
China exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1964 at the desert site of Lop Nor, a frequent target of US intelligence-gathering operations.
"There was real anxiety at the top, starting with Kennedy, that a nuclear China could erode US power in Asia and encourage nuclear proliferation there," said Mr William Burr, an analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington, which uncovered much of the new material. "There were officials in Defence who were nearly hysterical about a nuclear China." The huge risks, though, made action unlikely.
Taiwan, a staunch US ally in the 1960s and seat of Chiang Kaishek's defeated Kuomintang or Nationalist regime after Mao's 1949 communist revolution, is frequently cited in classified reports as a possible proxy for military action to wipe out or delay China's nuclear programme.
A 1964 report presented four separate military options - bombing raids by the US airforce; an air attack by Taiwan forces; a covert ground attack by agents inside China; and an air drop of a 100-man commando team from Taiwan.