In the Spring of 1955 President Eisenhower sent a mission to persuade Chiang Kai-shek to withdraw from Quemoy and Matsu because they were exposed. The President was unsuccessful; Chiang Kai-shek would not withdraw. Subsequently Eisenhower provided the Nationalists with air-to-air missiles that enabled them to sweep Mao's MIGs from the skies over the Taiwan Straits, and sent to Quemoy and Matsu 8-inch howitzers capable of firing nuclear shells. The military situation in the strait began to look more favorable for the Republic of China (ROC) in 1956 and 1957, a result of these improvements in the Nationalist forces due to US military assistance, and of the 1957 agreement between the United States and the Republic of China that placed Matador missiles on Taiwan. These surface-to-surface weapons were capable of carrying conventional or nuclear warheads up to 600 miles. Such developments, when combined with the US reduction of its representation to the US-PRC Geneva talks from ambassador to charge d'affaires in early 1958, may well have led the Chinese to believe that the situation in the strait was menacing.
The renewed threat to the islands came after Beijing had argued that Soviet ICBM developments had changed the world's balance of forces decisively in favor of the Communist bloc, but it came when the reliability of the Soviet deterrent was being questioned within the Chinese defense establishment. At the Moscow Conference of Communist Parties in November 1957, Mao contradicted Khrushchev's line that no one could win a nuclear war. He said that such a war would not be the end of the world, because half its population would survive. From other statements by Mao, it is clear he thought that a large part of the Chinese population would survive an atomic war.
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