TMD opens up possible ways for the US and Japan to impose disproportionate strategic costs on China without Japan's having to acquire nuclear weapons on its own account. TMD would force Beijing to develop a far more capable nuclear arsenal in order to preserve even minimum deterrence. China would need to commit vast resources at considerable cost, including opportunity costs. Beijing would incur additional costs because it would then spur further nuclear weapons development on the part of India, which fears and loathes China. (China was surprised by the 1998 Indian nuclear testing, even though China's missile sales to Pakistan did much to deepen Indian strategic anxieties.) Currently, China possesses one unreliable SSBN. The function of a full-throttle SSBN program be to add depth to China's nuclear deterfence, rather than to expand blue water capability in the conventional sense. Such a program would consume resources on a vast scale.
For Japan and the United States, the political advantage of TMD is its defensive character. But Japan would have to assume a larger defense burden, in ASW for example. Such a policy by the United States and Japan would not be free of risks and tensions. But if nuclear competition is to become part of the strategic equation in East Asia, it is better for the United States and Japan to set the terms, rather than allow China to do so.
Security on the Korean peninsula has long been connected with the strategic balance in the Taiwan strait. In 1950, China's entry into the Korean war caused President Eisenhower to move the US 7th fleet into the strait, thus ensuring that China could not take Taiwan by force. Now the North Korean missile threat has made Japan more willing to undertake limited rear area support for the United States in a Korean contingency. China fears that the new US-Japan defense guidelines might portend Japanese support for the United States in another crisis in the Taiwan strait. And China complains loudly that TMD in Japan could provide an umbrella over Taiwan, which might put the recalcitrant island further out of Beijing's grasp.
Taiwan： 'Sudetenland solution'?
China is pursuing a 'Sudetenland strategy' for Taiwan―the hope that for fear of war, others will acquiesce in the use of force or threat. In 1938, Hitler gobbled up Czechoslovakia without firing a shot. His instrument was the Sudeten Germans on Czechoslovakia's eastern frontiers, who wanted reunification with Germany. The democratic powers were unwilling to risk war on behalf of the Czechs, even though France had a treaty with Czechoslovakia. Having digested the Sudetenland, and promising that Germany 'has no further territorial ambition', Hitler lost no time in devouring the rest of helpless Czechoslovakia.
