U.S. wants nuclear talks with China
The United States has no nuclear hotline to Beijing. The two countries have never had a serious conversation about American missile defenses in the Pacific, or China’s experiments to blind U.S. satellites in time of conflict.
Chinese officials have consistently rejected the idea of entering arms control talks, shutting down such suggestions by noting the United States and Russia each have deployed five times more nuclear warheads than Beijing possesses.
President Joe Biden is seeking to change all that.
The United States is trying to nudge China’s leadership into a conversation about its nuclear capability. U.S. officials say Biden and his top aides plan to move slowly — focusing the talks first on avoiding accidental conflict, then on each nation’s nuclear strategy and the related instability that could come from attacks in cyberspace and outer space.
Finally — maybe years from now — the two nations could begin discussing arms control, perhaps a treaty or something politically less complex, such as an agreement on common norms of behavior.
In Washington, the issue has taken on more urgency than officials are acknowledging publicly, according to officials. Biden’s aides are driven by concern that a new arms race is heating up over hypersonic weapons, space arms and cyberweapons, all of which could unleash a costly and destabilizing spiral of move and countermove. The fear is that an attack that blinded space satellites or command-and-control systems could quickly escalate, in ways unimaginable in the nuclear competitions of the Cold War.
China’s capabilities could also pose a threat to Biden’s hopes of reducing nuclear weapons’ role in American defenses.
In a sense, this is the revival of an old fear in Washington: In 1964, Lyndon Johnson was so worried about the rise of another nuclear rival that he considered, but ultimately rejected, plans to conduct a preemptive strike or covert sabotage on China’s main nuclear testing site at Lop Nor.
This month, the Pentagon concluded the size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal may triple by 2030, to upward of 1,000 warheads. But the administration’s concern is not just the number of weapons — it is the new technology, and particularly how Chinese nuclear strategists are thinking about nontraditional nuclear arms.