How Did the CIA Lose a Nuclear Device in the Himalayas?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e9/SNAP-19C_Moun...
Cesium-painted watch hands are also "nuclear devices".
So, it's possible that they retrieved it, but can't say that because it would confirm that the mission existed.
and all of the related metadata of the details and assets of the mission.
Historians of this time period usually describe India as having a more frigid relationship with America by the mid 1960’s with India moving closer to the Soviet Union and the United States moving closer to Pakistan. But articles like this demonstrate that the situation may have been more complex than that.
Of course geopolitics can sometimes change quickly. The leadership in the US and in India did change between 1965, the early 1970’s and the late 1970’s so that was a factor as well.
The US shifted to becoming de facto allied with China in the early 1970s as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, and Pakistan helped with the initial backdoor diplomacy [0][1] that lead to US-Chinese normalization in the 1970s.
India, having fought a war against both Pakistan and China in the 1960s, pivoted to the Soviet Union as a result, who were also miffed at China because of the Sino-Soviet split and were looking for a bulwark.
> Historians of this time period usually describe India as having a more frigid relationship with America by the mid 1960’s with India moving closer to the Soviet Union and the United States moving closer to Pakistan
A major reason was Brzezinski - LBJ and later Carter's foreign policy czar.
He was a "realist" whose primary goal was boxing in the USSR (he spent his early childhood in Moscow during the Stalinist purge and Poland before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). As such, he pivoted the US away from India in favor of Pakistan and China.
The is why the US went from building IITs and allowing it's tech companies like Burroughs and IBM building joint ventures in 1960s India to de facto sanctions in the 1970s.
Kissinger followed a similar policy as Brzezinski, and IMO a major reason was that both grew up in pre-War Europe and their past experiences colored their views as a result.
[0] - https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2015/10/pakistan-and-ch...
[1] - https://www.isas.nus.edu.sg/papers/pakistan-china-relations-...
India may have had a relationship, but they were never a Soviet ally or anything like it. They led the Non-Aligned Movement.
Finally, the NAM movement began fading from 1962 following the Sino-Indian war and died by the late 1970s with the US pivot to China [6]
[0] - https://www.mea.gov.in/Portal/LegalTreatiesDoc/RU71B1557.pdf
[1] - https://www.mea.gov.in/Portal/LegalTreatiesDoc/RU72B1581.pdf
[2] - https://www.cpushack.com/2021/08/02/the-6502-travels-the-wor...
[3] - https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/economy/story/19831015-se...
[4] - https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA089122.pdf
[5] - https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/06/world/on-india-s-border-a...
Couldn't we say the US has a similar relationship with India now, at least before Trump II? We send them goodies to keep them friendly, but little geopolitical support that has significant consequence is exchanged. ?
For example, India didn't/doesn't permit military bases, if either the US or USSR wanted them. The US/USSR didn't cause an Indian victory against their neighbors (or did the Soviets have material effect on the Pakistan-Bangladesh split in 1971?).
No worries. This is my kvetching/random posting throwaway.
> Couldn't we say the US has a similar relationship with India now, at least before Trump II
Not to the same degree simply because
1. India's economy today has reached the same inflection point that the Chinese economy did in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
2. Middle Powers like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, France, and Israel have either caught up to or exceed American capacity in a number of critical technologies, and have begun mass scale capital and tech transfers to India
For 1,
India is essentially following the same trajectory as China, but 10-15 years behind because the economic isolation India faced from 1976-1991 along with the Warsaw Bloc's weakening economic heft lead to the 1990s era political and economic crisis.
India wasn't the only Soviet-leaning country that faced this issue. Even Vietnam - which used to have a HDI and GDP PPP per Capita well above the PRC until the late 1990s - suffered a lost decade for the same reasons India did due to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.
For 2,
A major reason China took off in the 2000s was because Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese partners like TDK, Toshiba, Samsung, UMC, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, etc all began transferring IP related to energy, biotech, military hardware, semiconductors, automobiles, and other STEM industries to China via JVs. For example, BYD and CATL got their head starts in the 2000d thanks to Samsung and TDK respectively transferring battery chemistry IP to them in the 2000s.
Japanese, Taiwanese, South Korea, French, and Israeli firms all started similarly mass IP and capital transfers to Indian JVs from 2014 due to a mix of economic and geopolitical tensions with China along with the fact that India has become the last large greenfield economy that Chinese competitors cannot operate within.
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Because of 1 and 2, India has started exhibiting similar hallmarks to China back when I was observing them closely (and being ignored) in the late 2000s and early 2010s. In the Indian policymaking space, policies similar in scale and ambition to those that the PRC adopted in the early 2010s are being constantly enacted, and just like "China Shock" 15 years ago, an "India Shock" has started arising at least in IP heavy industries.
The fact that India is now spending around $205B on infra [0] (comparable to Chinese infra spend in the early 2010s), a combined [1] $30B [2] on semiconductor development (comparable in size to the Chinese Big Fund 1.0), $12B in government provided DeepTech VC funding [3] that is being matched dollar-for-dollar by private giants like Nvidia and Qualcomm [4], and similarly sized initiatives by the Japanese [5], Korean [6], Taiwanese [7], French [8], and Israeli [9] champions, and subsidizing electronic components [10] and rare earth [11] processing upskilling, enacting China-style labor reforms [12], and opening the entire Nuclear [13] and Electricity [14] sector to 100% private investment means a lot of capacity is in the process of being built out at the same scale as was in China during the early years of the Xi admin's "Make in China" initiative.
This is why I keep harping about India - even if a large portion of the funds are misallocated, they would still end up developing an ecosystem. The same thing happened with mismanagement of funds in the first iteration of "Make in China" but administrative capacity got better.
If we mismanage the India relationship, we may inadvertently end up making another ambivalent continental scale rival like China and Russia (yes they are in a recession and nowhere near as powerful as they were at their peak, yet they can enact severe pain nonetheless).
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-06-12/india-...
[1] - https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/08/indias-semico...
[2] - https://manufacturing.economictimes.indiatimes.com/amp/news/...
[3] - https://www.ibef.org/news/government-approves-rs-1-00-000-cr...
[4] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/nvidia...
[5] - https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/international-relations/jap...
[6] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250903PD208/samsung-india-...
[7] - https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202506240030
[8] - https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/indias-defence-industry-is...
[9] - https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-04-19/ty-article-ma...
[10] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-approves-626-milli...
[11] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-approves-816-mln-r...
[12] - https://www.ft.com/content/b991095c-e0b9-425e-949d-ecc5d3039...
[13] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
[14] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/india-...
With ~1/3 of the world population and those two economies, allied they might be unstoppable if the two nationalists can hold it together. Imagine a wide-ranging trade agreement and dominating the most strategic region in the world. And what could South Asian and SE Asian countries do but go along.
...
On another note, you've amazingly generated about 50 footnotes. I always prefer them and those are credible sources, but how do you crank this out? Do you just know what you're looking for and search nytimes.com or have an LLM find the articles? I'd love to find these things that quickly.
I'm usually the person in the conversation who knows the most about this history. It's been very interesting; thanks again.
> But those are resolvable or manageable...
It won't happen unless China gives up claims on Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh. The issue is China cannot because these are ethnic Tibetan regions.
Additionally, Paharis (a catch all term for the Indo-European speaking ethnic group that straddles the High Himalayas) are overrepresented in the Indian Armed Forces, and everyone in the community is 1-2 degrees separated from someone who was either impacted in one of the various Indo-China standoffs or knows people impacted by the Chinese invasion of Tibet. For a large portion of Paharis, the view on China is similar to how Poles view Russian aggression in Ukraine.
> but how do you crank this out? Do you just know what you're looking for and search nytimes.com or have an LLM find the articles
The former. I concentrated in Computer Science but got a secondary in Government primarily concentrating on an institutionalist approach to Asia and MidEast studies.
You remember that Watson quote in A Study in Scarlet about Sherlock Holmes' limited knowledge outside of a couple areas [0] - that's the same for me.
I cannot differentiate between Brad Pitt and Leonardo DeCaprio (I do watch movies and shows - I just don't know or care about the names of most actors), I don't know any song by Taylor Swift (I do listen to music, but I'm not the most knowledgeable of the latest trend), I have almost no knowledge of contemporary literature (I do read modern lit, but I'm usually 3-5 years behind the trend or zeitgeist), and I don't really follow sports aside from UFC (but I have been actively cross-training BJJ/Judo, Muay Thai/TKD, and trail running from grade school to yesterday). I also never read the news aside from a couple of primary and industry sources (eg. Reuters, Bloomberg Terminal, FT, The Economist, Axios, Politico (US and EU), TechCrunch, and a couple region specific sources) and constantly avoid narrative-based journalism (they are fun to read, but tend to waste time when trying to get to the point). I also don't use social media except hate-posting on HN or nerding out on Lobsters.
Basically, my equivalent of gossip and faux moi is the intersection of tech (I have another similarly in-depth throwaway for the technical niches I'm interested in), policy, and business.
> I'd love to find these things that quickly
If your actually interested in these topics and can afford it, I'd recommend doing a part-time masters at the Harvard Extension School in Government [1], the MLA program at Stanford [2], or the distance MA in War Studies at KCL [3].
Alternatively, intensely studying the reading list for a specific field (eg. The PPE required reading list for Balliol College, Oxford [4] or the CS tripos at Cambridge) builds the conceptual foundation needed to apply to a field.
Once you build the conceptual models and table stakes skills needed for a specific field, everything else falls into place.
[0] - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9097989-his-ignorance-was-a...
[1] - https://extension.harvard.edu/academics/programs/government-...
[2] - https://mla.stanford.edu/
[3] - https://www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/study-with-us/online
[4] - https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate-admiss...
I also cut everything I don't value especially - music (outside occasional jazz/classical concerts), sports, pop culture, social media, YouTube. I highly value arts but cut the time required to converse topically about them; few artists face our surreal current reality anyway. So I read literature or see film (the Criterion Channel could fill my time itself) or other arts of any provenance, in order to find the truly extraordinary and the next frontier for my mind. But even that leaves far too many options. I also began to create art myself (with no training, for a very intimate circle) - that has changed my life more than anything. That is something I highly recommend.
For exceptional IR articles you might see Just Security . Their core team is high-level IR attorneys (e.g., State Department, ICRC, etc.), and they don't hold back intellect or sophistication, though I can't talk about their a theoretical perspective. Their curated daily news brief is very useful.
I've watched 2 or 3 hours of videos and that isn't what I took away. She does argue that a rules based international order, free trade, democracy and liberalism is a superior system to authoritarianism, but I don't think too many people (in the West, at least) would disagree with that.
I'd recommend following academics affiliated with the FSI@Stanford or the Fairbanks Center@Harvard instead. They tend to be the ones most in touch with policymakers on both sides of the Pacific, and are often a conduit for Track 1.5 and Track 2 dialogues.
There has been a deluge of academics in the US entering "China studies" in the same way you saw "Mid East experts" proliferate in the 2000s and "Kremlinologists" in the 1980s-90s.
That was my take. I don't know that she calls herself that. She certainly seems very knowledgeable about China (and Japan and Russia).
From Wikipedia:
"She spent ten years on her doctoral research in Russian and Chinese history at Columbia University, which included five years of research and language study in China, Taiwan, Russia, Japan, and Australia.'
Most of her early research on China was with regards to Imperial Russia and Imperial China's rivalry in East and North Asia (ended up being published into a book back in the 1980s [0]), but was largely superficial and done in the context of US-China normalization in the 70s as a check against the USSR. Her limited Putonghua fluency is a major issue as well for someone who is a supposed China scholar.
Much of her work about that time period has been superseded by Yuhua Wang [1] and other younger and more quantitative scholars who took more of an institutionalist approach.
Even during my (limited) time, she was not viewed as a significant academic in the space - that remains to be students of John Fairbanks, Kenneth Lieberthal, Mary Gallagher, Rodrick MacFarquhar, and Yasheng Huang because a large portion of Chinese decisionmakers today either studied under them or under faculty who were advised by them in the 1980s-2000s period.
Furthermore, she has a history of media self promotion, and the loudest academics (especially on YouTube) tend to be the least regarded, because media engagements are such a time sink that it means you aren't really participating in policymaking adjacent work like Track Diplomacy.
This is why I take a dim view of her - she started off in the 70s as a Latin America researcher who pivoted to Russian history in the 80s, Japanese history in the 90s, Naval history in the 2000s when trying to get tenure, and China recently in the 2010s. These aren't the hallmarks of a domain expert and I say this as someone who studied under a couple of those. Instead, these are the hallmarks of a pop academic like Perun or Michio Kaku (if you want a STEM equivalent).
Heck, she's started trying to pivot/shoehorn India studies over the past 2 years the same way as the others becuase there is a vacuum in the field now that the most relevant contemporary India academics in the US (Raghuram Rajan, Aravind Subramanian, Karthik Subramanian, Ashutosh Varshney, Karthik Muralidharan, Nirupam Bajpai, and Milan Vaishav) have taken steps back from US academia because they are all either transitioning or transitioned into Indian policymaking roles, or like Ashley Tellis were caught in a Biden-era espionage investigation for leaking documents on behalf of China [2] around the same time his public advocacy suddenly shifted from being China-antagonistic and India-leaning to China-leaning and India-antagonistic [3] (2021-24 period). Now that "Indo-Pac Studies" is where academic funding in the policy space has started shifting towards, and the vacuum that has developed, grifters like Paine are trying to enter the field like they did China studies 15 years ago and MidEast studies 20 years ago.
[0] - https://www.routledge.com/Imperial-Rivals-China-Russia-and-T...
[1] - https://yuhuawang.scholars.harvard.edu/
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/16/indian-born-...
[3] - https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/ashley-j-tellis
Its location isn't strategic (valuable) to those rivalries, unlike Europe or Japan; for example, India shares a border with China but the Himlayas are an uncrossable barrier for large military operations - India is no threat to and is not threatened by China in a serious way, and is far from Russia and its strategic interests.
Its enormous size and population make it very expensive to influence militarily or politically, unlike smaller countries in Africa, for example. Those factors plus India's location made them less economically dependent on the rivarly countries. And India was very poor, so it provided little value to control economically.
For India, the obvious choice was and is to stay out of those fights - they have little to gain and much to lose, both in money spent on military, and other geopolitical costs including sovereignty. Instead, they can sit securely in South Asia and invest in themselves (or the leaders can cash in on corruption).
Now India has much more value economically, but that also makes them more secure. They verbally becoming more aggressive, but they have few targets and it seems like the commonplace tactic of nationalism.
> the situation may have been more complex than that
It always is on a micro level, but India is not becoming a US ally.
Neutral with the Russians, a natural ally against the Chinese. (China and India have extant border disputes. And China has been working with Pakistan to contain India for decades.)
True. I've always meant to research how India and Pakistan polarised into their respective Soviet and American spheres, particularly given China and Pakistan's nuclear coöperation.
That was the case awhile ago. After the Afghan war the US switched to India, who they would much prefer as an ally - huge economy, growing military, relevant in sea lanes. The US basically abandoned Central Asia along with exiting Afghanistan.
It's literally still true right now (Major Non-NATO Ally status is an official designation with legal effects on trade in security-related trade and contracting eligibility effects), which has trust implications on the policy shift to try to woo India more tightly.
That greatly exaggerates the picture, as I understand it. They have symbolic border disputes which are difficult to resolve (you can't really fight a war in the Himalyas). Neither can appear to surrender (see alephnerd's comments on this page), but otherwise no interests are really at stake. They can't affect each other militarily, not much geopolitically - two oceans and the Himalyas separate them - and so far not much economically.
The US has been trying to enlist India against China but India, as usual, is happy to accept our gifts of trade, technolgy, and miltary aid and to smile for the cameras, but isn't participating in our geopolitical struggles.
Why would they get involved in our fight? To win some glaciers in the Himalyas? India also lacks the military and really the economic power to compete with China, and has many other things to spend money on.
They shot at each other in '21 [1].
> They can't affect each other militarily
China is building naval bases in Pakistan [2] and Sri Lanka [3]. India is heavily dependent on seaborne oil imports [4].
I'm not even going into the various chokes China has on India along the Himalayas. (India lacks similar game-over pinch points on Beijing.)
In the same way India controls the upstream Indus to Pakistan, China controls the upstream Brahmaputra to India [5]. (India maintains Nepal and Bhutan as de facto suzerainties.)
> not much geopolitically
Pakistan just beat India in an air battle. India flew Russian and French jets. Pakistan fielded an integrated Chinese air defence system.
> US has been trying to enlist India against China but India, as usual, is happy to accept our gifts of trade, technolgy, and miltary aid and to smile for the cameras, but isn't participating in our geopolitical struggles
India was banning Chinese imports before Trump. Which makes sense. China is building capabilities that would let it unilaterally shut down the Indian economy and potentially, if it can pressure Russia, military, on the order of months. That means territories, alliances and even market access terms New Delhi would prefer to determine as a sovereign become ones it must defer to Beijing on.
India won't (and shouldn't) fight America's fight for it. It's a properly sovereign state. But sovereignty takes work. And much of that work dovetails with the alliances America is building in the region.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_China%E2%80%...
[2] https://www.csis.org/analysis/pakistans-gwadar-port-new-nava...
[3] https://thediplomat.com/2023/08/aiddata-report-warns-of-a-ch...
[4] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/energy/oil-gas...
> China is building capabilities that would let it unilaterally shut down the Indian economy
They can cause problems, but again, that's overstating it imho.
As the Pu238 decays it will transform into other materials that will probably emit beta and gamma radiation which could be detected. And also the shielding might get compromised over time (hopefully not!)
But at least when it was new this would not have been an option. Heat was the only detectable emission coming off it.
Comically correct, but I suspect you meant to say "It can..."
But my point was, even the fuel tubes themselves will have more than adequate shielding against the alpha particles emitted. So it's not even that dangerous that the Sherpas were using them to heat their beds :)
By the way I have since looked it up and Plutonium 238 decays to Uranium 234 which is also an alpha emitter but with a huge half-life (235.000 years). So it looks lke it does not actually produce more penetrating radiation as it decays. The uranium will degrade to an unstable thorium isotope eventually too but this will be quite minimal due to the long half-life.
Did they really need to plant that on top of a Himalyan mountain? Also, even if successful, how do you service it? The environment is as rough on equipment as it is on climbers.
I understand there were no satellites yet, but there were no other options?
In the eyes of contemporary NatSec leadership like Kissinger (Nixon, Ford) and Brzezinski (LBJ, Carter), leveraging the Sino-Soviet split to box in the Soviets was the ideal option.
As such, from 1972-1992 the US posted soldiers in Xinjiang monitoring the USSR [0], sponsored govenrnent led tech transfers and scientific collaboration [1], provided support for Chinese military modernization [2][3], and expanded economic cooperation [4].
This also played a role as to why US intel in the 2000s assumed Xi Jinping would be pro-American [5], as he started his career working on the US supported modernization of the PLA as a junior secretary to Geng Biao [6] - who was the primary reason the Maoist regime was overthrown in the 1970s.
By the 1970s, the primary NatSec goal was blocking the USSR, and as a result realism became the primary foreign policy strategy used by the US. As such, you ended up seeing policies like ditching India and Taiwan in favor of Pakistan and China, supporting communist Somalia over not-really-communist Dergist Ethiopia during the Ogaden War, and swaying then Soviet-aligned Egypt in favor of the US by cultivating Anwar Sadat and culminating in the Camp David Accords.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/18/world/us-and-peking-join-...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.%E2%80%93China_Agreement_o...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/17/world/us-decides-to-sell-...
[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/04/archives/study-urges-us-a...
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/26/business/us-china-investm...
[5] - https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BEIJING3128_a.html
> ditching ... Taiwan in favor of ... China
Is that really an accurate description? The US continued to explicitly support Taiwan's political and military separation from China, and compelled China to agree to it - as long as Taiwan didn't try to leave China and form another country, they could remain as they were (and are).
The change was that the US had formerly recognized Taiwan as the government of all China and therefore possesor of China's UN Security Council seat, and in their deal with Mao switched to recognizing China.
The following is my understanding: The civil war ended 1949; the Communists won, and the Nationalists fled to Taiwan. That is well-known; the following is a bit of speculation: For awhile, arguably it might have been plausible to deny Communist rule and imagine the Nationalists could govern China, maybe by reinvading and another uprising like those China had experienced since 1911 - the Communists were very weak. But by 1970 the result of the civil war must have been clear and the idea of the Taiwanese Nationalists as government of mainland China was a pointless fiction.
But it was very important to the Communists and a valuable chit in a negotiation. Taiwan's hurt feelings were irrelevant - they were dependent on the US and couldn't do anything about it. Recognizing the reality of Communist mainland control had little cost and great gain.
Yes.
The Taiwanese reaction [0] to US-led modernization of the PLA in the 1980s [1], the Reagan admin's snub of the Taiwanese military regime [2], it's retaliation against Taiwan for assasinating Henry Liu in Daly City [3][4], and Trump-style tariffs against Taiwan [5] that ended up [6] becoming a sanctions regime [7] lead to a sense of distrust of the US by 1980s-90s Taiwanese leadership and it's international isolation [8].
Looking back, the playbook Trump is using against China today is almost the exact same as the one the Reagan administration used against Taiwan.
> The US continued to explicitly support Taiwan's political and military separation from China, and compelled China to agree to it - as long as Taiwan didn't try to leave China and form another country, they could remain as they were (and are).
This became a US policy under the Clinton administration, with it's support for Tibetan sovereignty [10], it's rehabilitation of American ties to Taiwan [11] during collapsing ties with China [12], and the US Navy's show of force in the Taiwan Straits [13] which lead to the current Taiwan policy [14]
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/09/world/big-military-high-t...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/18/world/taiwan-assails-us-a...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/28/world/reagan-s-reversal.h...
[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/11/opinion/the-long-arm-of-t...
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/31/us/taiwan-held-liable-in-...
[5] - https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/24/business/correcting-the-t...
[6] - https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/19/business/taiwan-may-face-...
[7] - https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/12/business/us-puts-sanction...
[8] - https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/26/world/taiwan-pushes-to-re...
[9] - https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/06/world/china-protests-to-t...
[10] - https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/30/opinion/IHT-policy-toward...
[11] - https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/30/opinion/IHT-policy-toward...
[12] - https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/18/opinion/IHT-the-united-st...
[13] - https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/11/world/us-sending-more-shi...
[14] - https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/12/world/ambiguity-on-taiwan...
> This became a US policy under the Clinton administration
What about Carter's Taiwan Relations Act? Or was that not really implemented by Reagan?
And how did Taiwan remain independent for 20 years from Nixon to Clinton? I assumed it had to be our support. I understand the PLA was weak and inward-focused and couldn't mount a cross-Strait invasion, but someone had to trade with and arm Taiwan. Japan seems implausible for historical reasons and for their pacificism; South Korea wasn't powerful enough then, probably very focused north, and wouldn't want to antagonize the Communists; I doubt Europeans were involved so far afield ...
It was enacted by the "China Lobby" [0] in Congress, and Carter had no choice but to ratify it due to his crumbling popularity during his reelection campaign.
Before Israel developed staunch bipartisan support in Congress in the 1990s, the most powerful foreign lobby was the ROC's due to Chiang Kai Shek's wife Soong Mei Ling and her family - they were all products of the New England boarding school-to-Ivy League pipeline and her brother T.V. Soong was one of the largest shareholders in General Motors and DuPont and was one of the richest people in the world from the 1940s-60s [1] and was personal friends with the future Senator (and Republican presidential candidate) Barry Goldwater back when T.V. Soong helped bankroll the "Hump" during WW2 [8] (I recommend reading "The Soong Dynasty" by Seagrave to learn more).
> And how did Taiwan remain independent for 20 years from Nixon to Clinton? I assumed it had to be our support
It was partially because of the China Lobby, the PLA's de facto loss of institutional capacity due to the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent purge due to it's failure in the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War [2], military pressure from India [3], Vietnam [4], North Korea [5], and the Soviet Union [6] making the PRC feel encircled, and Taiwanese attempts at economic diplomacy in then poverty stricken PRC that needed foreign capital to rebuild [9][10].
> I doubt Europeans were involved so far afield
They supported PLA modernization [7].
> probably very focused north, and wouldn't want to antagonize the Communists
The South Korean military junta in the 1980s was pro-America and aligned with the US policy to mend ties with China.
> Japan seems implausible for historical reasons
Japan aligned with US policy at the time and began mending ties with China in the early 1980s which lead to a massive counter-reaction that became the seeds of Nippon Kaigi (the nationalist movement that every Japanese PM has been a member of since the late 1990s)
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_lobby_in_the_United_Stat...
[1] - https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/mill-1-timeli...
[2] - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10670564.2019.15...
[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/08/world/india-and-china-cit...
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/14/world/peking-hanoi-intere...
[5] - https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/05/world/china-turns-attenti...
[6] - https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/21/world/soviet-china-talks-...
[7] - https://www.nytimes.com/1978/04/14/archives/china-looking-to...
[8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hump
[9] - https://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/20/world/first-china-taiwan-...
[10] - https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/13/world/taiwan-to-allow-mor...