There are a couple of parts to disentangle here to adequately answer these questions. Firstly, none of these three countries (PRC, GDR, FGR) are operating in a political vacuum. To invoke a cliche, nuclear weapons are not just military devices, but political ones as well. Not only is having them denote a level of independence, but that state postures on nuclear weapons often dovetailled with other political and ideological ideas. For example, when the PRC denounced the nuclear monopoly in the 1960s, it was also tapping into existing anticolonialist discourses about white European nations controlling the politics of the Third World. Thus when the PRC media attacked the various post-Cuban Missile Crisis initiatives like the Partial Test Ban Treaty as the result of two superpowers deciding they were to be the sole nuclear powers and rendering the rest of the world, in the words of the the People's Daily, "nuclear slaves." Such statements not only were an assertion of the PRC's independence, but also designed to capture the ear of the Third World as well as position the PRC within the Communist bloc as an alternative source of leadership than the apparently non-revolutionary Soviets who were now just playing geopolitics. In short, the nuclear issue in the Cold War was very much like a parfait (which everyone likes more than onions), it was layered with many levels of domestic and international issues that blended into each other.

The case of nuclear weapons and the two Germanys exemplifies this point. If either of these states had went rogue during the Cold War and sought to develop their own nuclear arsenal, they arguably could have by the 1960s. Both nations possessed a strong engineering and scientific base and the technical hurdles for building a nuclear weapon were not insurmountable, especially after the Atoms for Peace program declassified a number of components of nuclear science for the purposes of creating nuclear reactors. The GDR even had the benefit of large uranium deposits in Erzgebirge and Vogtland mountains. The problem with nuclear procurement then for either Germany was political; neither state could go rogue. Memories of the Second World War ran long in Europe and constrained German rearmament as both blocs sought to ways to muzzle their respective Germanys. One way to do so was through controlling German military procurement. In the GDR, the Nationale Volksarmee was armed exclusively with Soviet weaponry and its force structure designed to fit in with the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG) as an auxiliary force. There was very little leeway for the ruling SED party to push for nuclear weapons under their own control since the "friends," as the SED media termed the Soviets, covered the strategic aspects of nuclear security.

Adenauer's FRG had much greater leeway to act than his counterparts in East Berlin, but still had to contend with a political milieu unfavorable to the Bundeswehr acquiring an independent nuclear force. Various elements within the ruling CDU/CSU in the late 1950s and early 1960s sought to gain a viable nuclear arsenal. In particular, Defense Minister Franz Joseph Strauss, who was also the Minister of Nuclear Energy, saw strategic nuclear weapons as the means to preserve FRG independence in a fickle geopolitical environment. Strauss, who was also one of the young Turks in the nascent CDU, consistently pushed for FRG nuclear armament and an independent Bundeswehr that would not merely be a spear-carrier for the American-led NATO. Strauss tried to cultivate a special relationship with De Gaulle and even proposed in 1962 that the FRG precede France in leaving NATO and the price would be French nuclear weaponry as well as a Franco-German military alliance that would be put in place after his ascent to the Chancellorship. Strauss typically overplayed his hands in these gambits, which was not an inconsiderable reason why he never was able to succeed Adenauer, but it does show the lengths to which some in the FRG sought to make Germany go nuclear. As late as 1969, Strauss's entourage proposed that a credible FRG nuclear deterrent was to be a minimum of 250 IRBMs that could reach into Soviet targets as far as the Urals. The problem for these plans was that neither superpower nor France were willing to countenance them, and they used the CDU government's public stance against atomic weapons, which was very popular within the FRG populace, to pressure Bonn to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

But the nuclear genie could not be completely stuffed back in the bottle for either Germany. Both NATO and GSFG war plans in the 1950s and 60s called for the extensive use of tactical nuclear weapons and both the Bundeswehr and the NVA had the ability to deliver such weapons. Often it was via so-called dual use weaponry that could be used either in a conventional or nuclear fashion depending upon the warhead. Tactical-fighter bombers could carry conventional or nuclear stores and both militaries maintained battalions of short-ranged rockets like the MGM-52 Lance that could be armed with nuclear warheads. But distrust of a nuclear Germany or fear of the political fallout from rearming Germany in this fashion meant that neither Germany retained control over the nuclear warheads in peacetime. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact superpower heads kept a firm control over these warheads and thus while both German militaries trained for their employment, they were, at least on paper, non-nuclear powers.

The PRC's nuclear strategy in the period of the mid-Cold War was on a different path than either superpower. The evolving Chinese nuclear doctrine had a number of different names, but political scientist Vipin Narang termed "assured retaliation." The idea behind Chinese nuclear forces was that the PRC could never create an arsenal to match either superpower, thus it sought to create an atomic reserve of sorts that could be used as a retaliatory weapon. While the two superpowers' nuclear strategy was predicated upon hair-trigger responses, the Chinese strategy was much more about absorbing the hit and striking back. Although the PRC did not have a nuclear device until the mid-1960s, the PRC leadership sometimes struck a blase tone to the use of nuclear weapons that alarmed outsiders. For instance, Khrushchev recalled an incident while bathing with Mao in a Beijing swimming pool in which the Chinese leader contended the US arsenal was a "paper tiger" and that since the Communist bloc had a larger population, it would triumph over the long-run in a nuclear confrontation. Such sentiments struck a number of Soviet leaders, all of whom had lived through the Second World War, as a reckless endangerment of not only the Soviet gains in the Second World War, but also its painful reconstruction. The sense that Beijing was in the hands of men who played casually with the idea of another world war was one of several reasons undergirding the Sino-Soviet split.

The PRC's public stance on nuclear weapons as a "paper tiger" as well as its denouncements of both Khrushchev's backing down over Cuba and the resulting nuclear treaties helped to further drive a wedge between the Soviets and the PRC. Behind the scenes, Mao and his cohort were more realistic about nuclear weapons and tacking to a blase attitude towards nuclear weapons fit within the PRC's limited capacity for a future nuclear arsenal. Furthermore, attacking the USSR for backing down in Cuba also highlighted the lack of true revolutionary fervor in Moscow and how its agreement to limit worldwide development of nuclear weapons into a select club of mostly white nations meant that the USSR was no longer the guidepost for world revolution. This was a position which set Beijing apart from Moscow and it was not an unprecedented one among Third World leftist movements. Che, for example, was apparently apoplectic over Khrushchev's unilateral decision to remove the missiles from Cuba and in various post-Crisis interviews, he talked of an atomic apocalypse as a victory against imperialism by virtue of the Third World's larger population.