Leaked documents show US military considered using nuclear weapons against China in 1958

SSG Robert Mark Odom
"After the Communist Party took power in mainland China in 1949, following a brutal civil war, the Nationalist government fled to Taiwan. But Beijing viewed the island as part of its territory, and the two sides clashed intermittently over the following decades.
The closest the US and China came to armed conflict was during the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1958, when the People's Republic of China fired artillery at Taipei's outlying islands. Washington worried the shelling could be a precursor to a full invasion."

I don't recall the source after all these years, but back in the 1970s it was considered an open(ish) secret that we had threatened to use atomic bombs against Chinese troop formations in Korea if the Chinese continued their counter-offensive too far south.
Which reminds me, about that assertion that, "The closest the US and China came to armed conflict was during the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1958"....

I thought this was pretty common knowledge that MacArthur wanted to use nuclear weapons on China during the Korean War. The Korean War was kind of a cluster. It was an odd time since it was a strange mix of veterans of WWII who were pressed back into service after being out for several years and then a bunch of drafted new soldiers. Combine that with poorly equipped soldiers and a command that was in Japan surrounded by yes men rather than people whole would tell MacArthur the truth about how the war was going. Then you had a commander in Korea running the UN forces that was a complete politician as a general rather than a leader and you had just a bad mix for waging war. Very interesting optics and politics in the Korean War. Definitely interesting to read about.