If a China and America war went nuclear, who would win?

After 45 days of conventional fighting, nukes would be tempting, wargamers suggest.

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It is bad enough to contemplate a war in Asia. It is grimmer still to think through a nuclear one. But somebody has to. And so Andrew Metrick, Philip Sheers and Stacie Pettyjohn, all of the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), a think-tank in Washington, recently gathered a group of experts to play a tabletop exercise a type of wargame - to explore how a Sino-American nuclear war could break out. The results were not encouraging.

In the exercise scenario, it is 2032 and a war over Taiwan has been raging for 45 days. China uses "theatre" nuclear weapons with a shorter range and smaller yield than the city-busting "strategic" missiles - to shorten the war by coercing America into submission.

The targets include Guam and Kwajalein Atoll - a pair of islands vital to America's military position in the Pacific - as well as an American aircraft carrier strike group.

That is distressingly plausible. One reason is the geography of the Asian battlefield.

During the Cold War America and the Soviet Union both planned to use lots of tactical nuclear weapons to destroy large and dispersed troop formations, often in the vicinity of towns and cities.