Getting Past No: Developing a Nuclear Arms Control Relationship with China

ABSTRACT

How can the United States get past the Chinese “no” to engaging on nuclear arms control? What can and should the United States do in the immediate to short term to lay the groundwork for arms control negotiations with China to begin? This paper reviews the origins and evolution of US-China nuclear relations and the history of China’s perceptions of, and approach to, nuclear arms control, and the restraint regimes more generally. On that basis, it reflects on several first steps that the United States can and should take now to try and develop an arms control relationship with China. The paper argues that developing such a relationship will take time but that taking these, or some of these, steps now is important.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• nuclear weapons
• arms control

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ During the Second World War, the United States supported the Chinese Nationalists and thus recognized them as the “true leaders” of China when they relocated to Taiwan after their defeat against the Communists in 1949.

² In 1965, Morton Halperin made clear that the United States should not be concerned by a nuclear China right now and in the short term. He stressed, however, that this would likely change in the long term (Halperin 1965, 86).

³ To be sure, some had expressed concerns about China much earlier. For instance, in 1998, a Select Committee established by the US House of Representatives and led by US Representative Christopher Cox found that China had conducted covert operations within the United States during the 1980s and 1990s to enhance its nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles and other weapons of mass destruction (US Select Committee 1999).

⁴ For good reasons: China, for instance, helped conclude the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to address Iran’s nuclear program.

⁵ Similar language was used in the National Defense Strategy (2018), the Nuclear Posture Review (2018), and the Missile Defense Review (2019).

⁶ Xi initially announced his intentions to jumpstart military reforms at the 2013 Third Plenum of the Eighteenth Party Congress. Four years later, he said that the people’s armed forces should become “world-class forces” by mid-century (Saunders, Ding, and Scobell 2019).

⁷ Discussions during track-2 and track-1.5 dialogues.

⁸ Also, the first batch of evidence (there are several) suggesting that China may be engaged in a nuclear build-up emerged in June 2021 (Warrick 2021).

⁹ Brad Roberts was the first to use this terminology in his edited volume (Roberts 2020, 5). The terminology denotes Chinese efforts to attain an equivalent level of force to the United States in an across military (and other) domains, not just in the nuclear realm.

¹⁰ Discussions during track-2 and track-1.5 dialogues.

¹¹ It was first mentioned in a tweet by US President Donald Trump on Dec. 3, 2018 (Trump 2018). The president repeated it in his 2019 State of the Union Address (Trump 2019).

¹² Two days after US President Trump’s original tweet talking about US-Russia-China trilateral arms control, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement rejecting the idea (Shuang 2018).

¹³ Of note: there is evidence that China worried about proliferation earlier; for instance, it signed the Treaty of Tlatelolco, which establishes a nuclear-weapon-free zone in Latin America, in 1973 and, significantly, it was the first of the NPT-recognized nuclear weapon state to do so.

¹⁴ Significantly, the original theorists of arms control defined it not solely as agreements limiting or reducing strategic forces but as any effort made by countries to enhance their security by maintaining strategic stability with their competitors, i.e. prevent war and arms races. Per that definition, therefore, the approach proposed in this paper would immediately jumpstart a US-China nuclear arms control relationship.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Santoro

David Santoro is President and CEO of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum, a foreign policy think tank focused primarily on Indo-Pacific security. His current work focuses on major power relations and US alliances, notably the role of China in an era of nuclear multipolarity. His volume US-China Nuclear Relations – The Impact of Strategic Triangles was published by Lynne Rienner in 2021.