Beijing’s nuclear buildup overshadows arms treaty

When negotiators from the United States and Russia met in Vienna last week to discuss renewing the last major nuclear arms control treaty that still exists between the two countries, U.S. officials surprised their counterparts with a classified briefing on new and threatening nuclear capabilities — not Russia’s, but China’s.

The intelligence had not yet been made public in the U.S., or even shared widely with Congress. But it was part of an effort to get the Russians on board with President Trump’s determination to prod China to participate in New START, a treaty it has never joined. Along the way, the administration is portraying the small but increasingly potent Chinese nuclear arsenal — still only onefifth the size of those fielded by the U.S. or Russia — as the new threat that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin should confront together.

Marshall Billingslea, Trump’s new arms control negotiator, opened his classified briefing, officials said, by describing the Chinese program as a “crash nuclear buildup,” a “highly alarming effort” to gain parity with the far larger arsenals that Russia and the U.S. have kept for decades.

The American message was clear: Trump will not renew any major arms control treaty that China does not also join — dangling the possibility that Trump would abandon New START altogether if he did not get his way. The treaty expires in February, just weeks after the next presidential inauguration.

Many outside experts question whether China’s buildup — assessed as bringing greater capability more than greater numbers — is as fast, or as threatening, as the Trump administration insists.

The intelligence on Beijing’s efforts remains classified, a senior administration official said, noting that sharing such data is not unusual among the world’s major nuclear weapons states. But that means it was given to an adversary with whom the U.S. is conducting daily, lowlevel conflict — including cyberattacks, military probes by warplanes and Russian aggression in Ukraine. And that was before reports surfaced that a Russian military intelligence unit had put bounties on U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan.

The U.S. official said the administration would try to declassify and make public some of the assessment about China.