According to The Strategist, Taiwan had an overt nuclear weapons program until 1976 and a covert one into the 1980s. It has nuclear reactors similar to the ones in Japan that can be converted to produce weapons-grade plutonium in short order if that decision is made.

Weak security guarantees from the United States, coupled with escalating aggression from China, may soon present Biden [this article is from December 2020] with a Taiwan that believes its only option for survival is to take a page from the Israeli playbook and restart a covert nuclear weapons program. When Taiwan went down that path between 1967 and the late 1980s, the government in Taipei ultimately backed away from nuclear weapons because it appeared China was liberalising and heading toward democratisation…

According to China expert Michael Pillsbury, author of The hundred-year marathon, the Chinese Communist Party intends to integrate Hong Kong and Taiwan back into China in time to achieve ‘Middle Kingdom’ status by 2049—the centennial of the CCP’s victory over the Guomindang in the Chinese civil war…

Taiwan already has two operational nuclear power plants on opposite ends of the island that could produce plutonium. It could use a ‘Japan option’ of enriching its radioactive materials for weaponisation in a short timeframe.

The Strategist

I think we take it for granted that nuclear proliferation is driven by a few rogue states. But this does not appear to be the case. The world appears to be on the verge of getting much more dangerous. Every country with nuclear weapons increases the odds (depressingly, the certainty, given enough time) of a nuclear detonation somewhere, sometime.

The Cuban Missile Crisis would seem to offer a cautionary tale. Put some nuclear missiles on an island near an aggressive nuclear superpower, and bad things can happen. We give our (U.S.) democratically elected leader at the time for avoiding catastrophe by acting tough and making the authoritarian leader “blink”. How much of that was luck, and how long until our world’s luck runs out if we keep taking risks like that? Another cautionary tale would be China’s invasion of Korea in the 1950s. They did not have nuclear weapons at the time, the U.S. not only had them but had recently used them, and China did not “blink”.