THE HISTORY of attempts to contain modern China is not a happy one. The Soviet Union tried it in 1960 when Mao Zedong's insouciance about nuclear war—he had suggested that such a conflict would kill more imperialists than socialists, leaving the world ruined but Red—alarmed Nikita Khrushchev. Soviet technical advisers, including nuclear-weapons experts who shredded all documents they could not carry, were withdrawn from China. Chinese technicians reassembled the shreds, recovering clues which helped China test an atom bomb four years later.
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