US-China Relations and Nuclear Weapons in Northeast Asia

ABSTRACT

If Northeast Asia is to have a nuclear weapons-free future, the United States and China must cooperate to make it happen. Unfortunately, decision-makers in both nuclear-armed states are preparing for a future military conflict and are upgrading their nuclear arsenals. In the United States, decision-makers are dependent on a cadre of security bureaucrats who circumscribe acceptable policy options. A review of the past and the present shows that the orthodox policies produced by these bureaucrats failed to resolve longstanding security problems in Northeast Asia: problems that decision-makers try to keep at bay with threats and preparations to use nuclear weapons. If US decision-makers were willing to see that history through Chinese eyes, with the aim of understanding how it influences Chinese decisions and actions in the present, the prospects for a nuclear-free future in Northeast Asia might be brighter.

KEYWORDS:

• US-China relations
• nuclear weapon
• Northeast Asia
• diplomacy

Introduction

If Northeast Asia is to have a nuclear weapons-free future, the United States and China must cooperate to make it happen. Unfortunately, decision-makers in both nuclear-armed states are preparing for a future military conflict. They show little interest in cooperation, compromise, dialogue, or diplomacy. Both governments are upgrading their nuclear arsenals. US military planners remain committed to using nuclear weapons first if conventional munitions prove insufficient. Chinese planners appear to be attempting to demonstrate their ability to retaliate is beyond question. Together these behaviors provoke nuclear arms racing and increase the risk of nuclear war.

How should proponents of nuclear disarmament respond? What can they do to encourage decision-makers in the United States and China to work together towards a nuclear-free Northeast Asia? Some emphasize the opportunity costs of engaging in an arms race neither country can win. Others argue that nuclear deterrence, which is predicated on maintaining credible threats to use nuclear weapons, is incompatible with international humanitarian law. Both call attention to the risks and consequences of nuclear war. They also seek to mobilize domestic and international political coalitions strong enough to persuade decision-makers to reduce and eventually eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

Global advocates for nuclear disarmament have produced meaningful results. The ratification of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) successfully limited the number of nuclear weapons states and established a legal obligation for complete disarmament. Over a hundred non-nuclear weapons states have established five nuclear weapons free zones covering Central and South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and Central Asia. Nuclear weapons are also barred by treaty from Antarctica and outer space. The negotiation of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) successfully limited the testing of nuclear weapons and created a global organization with the technical capability to monitor compliance. The ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) established that continued reliance on nuclear deterrence is a violation of international humanitarian law. The TPNW also created a legal vehicle for non-nuclear weapons states to take steps to compel their nuclear armed neighbors to honor their NPT obligation to disarm.

The remaining barriers to a nuclear weapons-free world are the security policies of the nine nuclear-armed states and support for extended nuclear deterrence policies in a small group of US-allied non-nuclear nations. In the United States these policies are sustained by a cadre of security bureaucrats who circumscribe acceptable policy options for elected decision-makers. They do this by creating and propagating the concepts and terminology that set the terms of US debates about security. Advancement within this US bureaucracy is restricted to individuals who demonstrate a willingness to adopt and employ established security concepts and terminology. In this way, what critical observers describe as a “nuclear priesthood” maintains an orthodoxy that has enshrined nuclear deterrence as an article of faith.

Adherents argue the absence of nuclear war justifies their faith. Former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, reflecting on the lessons he learned from practicing nuclear deterrence, believed avoiding nuclear war was more a matter of luck than wisdom. At the end of his career, he concluded “the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons” would inevitably lead to nuclear war (Morris 2003). He questioned the propriety of continuing to rely on nuclear deterrence to prevent it.

A review of the past and the present shows that orthodox policy has failed to resolve the security problems in Northeast Asia that decision-makers try to keep at bay with threats and preparations to use nuclear weapons. Contemporary observers are fond of talking about the emergence of a “New Cold War” between the United States and China when it would be more accurate to say that the original Cold War in Asia never ended (Brands and Gaddis 2021). For more than seventy years, the best outcome US security bureaucrats have been able to achieve is to keep the entire region on the edge of a major war, and US decision-makers locked in a seemingly endless competition to gain the upper hand. The only hope they offer is that US rivals will either yield or collapse under the pressure of that competition.

How much longer should the people living in representative democracies in Northeast Asia continue to wait for something better? Experience, and a rapidly deteriorating security situation, suggest a need for change. But it is difficult to imagine alternative policies emerging from a US orthodoxy that continues to circumscribe options and discourage new thinking. A new security policy community might be able to produce a better outcome. That community can emerge if elected officials in the United States, Japan and other representative democracies in Asia stop deferring to their bureaucracies and assume greater responsibility for setting security policy.

McNamara argued for security policies grounded in empathy; an approach to adversaries that asks US decision-makers to “put ourselves in their skin and look at ourselves through their eyes, just to understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions”. He recalled it was US President John Kennedy’s ability to empathize with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and his willingness to compromise, that saved the world from nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Morris 2003).

There is very little empathy between US and Chinese leaders. Moreover, they developed significantly different orientations towards nuclear weapons that inhibit constructive discussion and the prospects for arms control and disarmament. There is a history of US nuclear threats and Chinese responses to them that began when the battle lines of the Cold War in Asia were drawn by US President Harry Truman at the outset of what Americans call the Korean War (Truman 1950), and what Chinese call the struggle to “Resist America, Help Korea, Protect Home and Defend the Country”. If US decision-makers could at least attempt to see that history through Chinese eyes, with the aim of understanding how it influences Chinese decisions and actions in the present, the prospects for a nuclear-free future in Northeast Asia might be brighter.

Northeast Asia’s Nuclear Past

The nuclear age began in Northeast Asia. It started when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Every nation in Northeast Asia felt the impact. Moreover, the region experienced multiple nuclear crises in the formative years of the Cold War. These events may explain why decision-makers in the region continue to place an extraordinary emphasis on nuclear weapons in their security policies.

The United States built atomic bombs, used them at the end World War II in the Pacific and employed its sole possession of these terrifying new weapons as leverage in post war diplomacy. Some Americans, especially some of the scientists who created them, were concerned about the consequences of their unfettered development and deployment (Smith 1971). But US decision-makers showed little genuine interest in pursuing international agreements to control them. Within ten years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the United States had built a nuclear arsenal with 2,422 nuclear warheads. The size of the US arsenal increased eight-fold in the next five years to 18,638 warheads (FAS 2022).

During these first fifteen years of the Cold War the United States was not rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal to keep pace with the Soviet Union. The Soviets had dramatically lower numbers of nuclear warheads during this period: only 200 by 1955 and only 1,605 by 1960, more than 10 times less than the US total (FAS 2022). US decision-makers launched an unrestrained nuclear build up for another reason. They felt they needed to demonstrate the US military was capable of fighting and winning wars anywhere in world at any time. They did not believe they could demonstrate that capability with conventional forces alone. That same mentality governs US extended deterrence policies today, especially in Northeast Asia.

The Chinese Communist victory over the US-allied Nationalist government in the Chinese civil war in October 1949 aggravated the anxieties propelling the US nuclear buildup (OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) 2011a). The US government hoped Nationalist China would help create a stable security environment in East Asia, including Southeast Asia, where it was given a custodial role in Vietnam. In May 1950, a week after communist forces defeated the last large concentration of Nationalist soldiers on the Chinese mainland, which were defending Hainan Island, US officials worried Chinese communist forces might advance into Southeast Asia. Truman responded by authorizing aid to the French forces trying to recover France’s former colonies in Indochina. It was the first step on the path to US involvement in the Vietnamese civil war (OSD 2011a).

France’s failure to appreciate the determination of the Vietnamese communists in the North led to a disheartening French defeat with insufferably large casualties at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. US Admiral Arthur Radford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prepared to use tactical US nuclear weapons to rescue the French position (Logevall 2016). Concerns about communist China’s response played a significant role in President Dwight Eisenhower’s decision not to intervene. It was not the first, nor would it be the last time the US government prepared to use nuclear weapons in East Asia because conventional options were deemed insufficient.

One month after the Chinese communist victory in Hainan, North Korean communist forces sought to unify their country by force and nearly succeeded. Truman sent US forces to stop them, and, at the same time, sailed the US 7^th Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to prevent Chinese communist forces from attacking the Nationalists, who had fled to Taiwan and other offshore islands. When he announced these US interventions, Truman identified “communism”, rather than specific opponents in China and Korea, as the adversary (Truman 1950).

Truman did this because an emerging US security bureaucracy mistakenly believed their Chinese and Korean opponents, along with the communist Vietnamese, were all part of a monolithic force coordinated by the Soviet Union and linked to developments in Europe. This perception that the United States was competing for global domination with a single phenomenon is what led US decision-makers to believe they needed to be able to fight and win military conflicts that could crop up anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice. This is worth remembering today when listening to US security bureaucrats, and US decision-makers, discussing an imagined global competition between “authoritarianism” and “democracy”. More importantly, the reemergence of this type of thinking is accompanied by calls to upgrade US nuclear forces, and to redeploy tactical, “tailored” or “nonstrategic” nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia (Colby 2018).

If US officials had talked to their counterparts in China, Korea, and Vietnam they would have understood they were highly independent actors with distinct and sometimes contradictory ideas and objectives. US decision-makers may have learned, for example, that Chinese communist decision-makers opposed North Korea’s attack on the south (Shen 2017). And they may have been more attentive to communist Chinese concerns the United States would expand the war into China. Chinese communist officials expressed those concerns to their US counterparts through diplomatic channels. They also warned them that if US forces crossed the original line that divided North and South Korea, it might provoke a Chinese military response. US decision-makers, who saw the situation as part of a global ideological struggle, ignored Chinese concerns and chose not to respond (Kulacki 2020).

As US forces approached the Chinese border, Chinese leaders debated large scale intervention in the war. Some were concerned the United States might attack China with nuclear weapons if they did. The Chinese troops massing on the border were also concerned about the possible US use of nuclear weapons and this influenced the debate in Beijing. Government Chairman Mao Zedong, who, five years earlier, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, famously called nuclear weapons a “paper tiger”, argued they were too destructive to be used effectively on the battlefield. He also argued the world would condemn the United States if it dropped atomic bombs on Chinese cities. Mao’s view prevailed and was communicated to the Chinese troops, who entered Korea in large numbers on 25 October 1950 (Xiangli 2013).

By the end of November US forces were in full retreat and losing ground rapidly. On November 30^th, President Truman threatened to use US nuclear weapons against the advancing Chinese forces. Some US officials hoped the threat of nuclear use would compel communist Chinese forces to withdraw. But they continued to advance and by the end of December they had pushed US forces back to the original dividing line between North and South Korea. Truman’s attempt to use the threat of US nuclear use to deter the Chinese communists from continuing to fight failed. Mao’s presumption that nuclear weapons were paper tigers; that they were primarily psychological weapons, gained credibility.

Indecisive fighting between Chinese and US forces in the center of Korea would continue until the summer of 1953. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, well known for his role in leading the allies to victory in WW II, assumed the US presidency in January 1953 having made a campaign pledge to end the fighting in Korea. Some of his advisors considered using nuclear weapons against the communist Chinese to make good on that promise. These considerations were discussed in the United States and overheard in China. The Chinese communist leadership was ready to negotiate an end to the fighting in May of 1951, but US insistence on terms the Chinese communists found intolerable – terms that would make it appear they were yielding to US threats – unnecessarily prolonged the war (Shen 2017).

Just two years later, in March of 1955, President Eisenhower precipitated what the Nobel Laurette and nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling once described as the most serious nuclear crisis of his lifetime. The risk of US nuclear use was greater, in his estimation, than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Schelling 2013). Chinese communist attempts to remove Nationalist troops and reclaim control of several small offshore islands close to the Chinese coast led Eisenhower to prepare to respond with nuclear attacks against airfields and artillery emplacements along the Chinese coast. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles publicly threatened to use what he described as new, smaller nuclear weapons that could be used to prove they were not “paper tigers” but could be used on the battlefield to fight and win wars (Abel 1955b). Vice President Richard Nixon told the press that, “tactical atomic explosives are now conventional” and were indispensable to the US ability “to fight an effective war in the Pacific” (Johnston 1955).

China’s primary objective in what came to be called the Taiwan Strait Crisis was to open formal diplomatic negotiations with the United States over the status of Taiwan and the fate of the government of the Republic of China (ROC), which, because of US insistence, and over the objections of many US allies, continued to hold China’s seat in the United Nations, and serve as the internationally recognized government of all of China, despite losing the Chinese mainland to the communists and fleeing to Taiwan (Kulacki 2020). The US government had steadfastly opposed talking to the Chinese communist leadership, including at the Geneva Conference of 1954: a refusal that resulted in the failure of the conference agreement and direct US military involvement in the Vietnam War (OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) 2011b).

The sense of crisis created by US nuclear threats at the beginning of the Taiwan Strait Crisis helped China’s communist leaders put enough diplomatic pressure on the US government to achieve their objective of convening bilateral talks on the future of Taiwan and the status of the ROC government (Kulacki 2020). The mere prospect of talks immediately reduced the possibility of war and practically eliminated the imminent risk of US nuclear use. But with an eye towards the future, the communist Chinese leadership pushed forward with its own nuclear weapons program. Psychological weapons are still weapons, and they felt a need for psychological protection from repeated US attempts to use what Chinese strategists call “nuclear blackmail” to prevent the Chinese communists from deposing the rival Chinese government in Taipei and unifying the country.

In the first paragraph of the only public statement the communist government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has ever made about why it developed nuclear weapons put it this way,

“China cannot remain idle and do nothing in the face of the ever-increasing nuclear threat posed by the United States. China is forced to conduct nuclear tests and develop nuclear weapons”.

Later in the same statement, issued immediately after their first successful test of a nuclear explosive device in October 1964, Chinese communist leaders describe their problem with the behavior of the US government, and how having their own nuclear weapons would solve it,

“They have it and you don’t, and so they are very haughty. But once those who oppose them also have it, they would no longer be so haughty, their policy of nuclear blackmail and nuclear threat would no longer be so effective … ”

The statement reiterates Mao’s characterization of nuclear weapons as a “paper tiger” and makes clear his characterization of the atomic bomb as a psychological weapon “is still our view at present”. But at the same time, the passage above admits US threats had a psychological effect Chinese leaders could not tolerate and felt the need to redress (PRC 1964).

US President Lyndon Johnson responded to the Chinese test with a statement containing promises to monitor China’s nuclear weapons program, to maintain US nuclear superiority and to be undeterred by a communist China with nuclear weapons. These three commitments continue to govern US responses to China’s nuclear weapons program today (Johnson 1964).

Those commitments led to an enormous build-up of US “battlefield” or “tactical” nuclear weapons in Asia that peaked at close to 5,000 weapons in the late 1960s (Norris, Arkin, and Burr 1999). It was precisely at that moment that US President Richard Nixon sought and found a diplomatic accommodation with communist China that significantly reduced US anxieties about the possibility and consequences of war in East Asia. That accommodation led to rapid reductions in the number of US nuclear weapons deployed in the region, which fell to approximately 2,500 by 1977 and to zero by 1992, when US President George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew all remaining US tactical nuclear weapons from the region (Koch 2012).

These reductions happened despite the steady improvement of Chinese nuclear capabilities. They acquired the ability to strike the continental United States with a nuclear-armed ballistic missile in 1979. They had the capability to deliver a small number of those to US targets by 1992. But the diplomatic rapprochement between the nations, the steady integration of the US and Chinese economies, and US expectations that China would become more democratic, diminished US government concerns about China’s increasing nuclear capabilities.

The Present US-China Nuclear Contest of Wills

For a variety of reasons, the diplomatic rapprochement Mao and Nixon brokered, and which held for nearly four decades, fell apart. Both sides now perceive each other as formidable military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological adversaries. The two major security problems dividing Northeast Asia since the beginning of the Cold War–the division of Korea and the separation of the Republic of China on Taiwan from the People’s Republic of China–remain unresolved. Longstanding territorial disputes between China and its neighbors in the South China Sea, the East China Sea and India are becoming acute. US-China economic integration is now perceived as a risk rather than a benefit and both governments are making serious efforts to decouple. The Chinese leadership’s commitment to communism is stronger than ever, and the US government’s determination to curtail communist China’s international influence is the primary objective of US national security policy.

US decision-makers chafe at descriptions of contemporary US-China relations that include the term “cold war”, most likely because Chinese leaders use it to criticize US behavior. US officials prefer to describe the relationship as a “great power competition” that is part of a global ideological struggle between “autocracy” and “democracy”. This seems like a distinction without a difference. One aspect that separates this struggle from the US-Soviet contest during the Cold War is the role of nuclear weapons. Chinese nuclear thinking has not emphasized the quest for numerical superiority that drove the United States and the Soviet Union to build tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, or the interest in maintaining numerical parity that shapes US and Russian behavior today.

This lack of Chinese emphasis on numbers is reflected in the huge disparity in the size of US and Chinese nuclear forces. Current estimates place the balance of nuclear warheads at more than 15 to 1 in favor of the United States, which has 5,428 to an estimated 350 for China (FAS 2022). This disparity is not attributable to a lack of economic or technological capacity. China may slightly narrow the gap after it completes the construction of several hundred new missile silos at three sites in western China (Kristensen and Korda 2021). Or it may be replacing parts of its ageing and increasingly vulnerable force of truck-based missiles with a more survivable alternative that is easier to operate.

The most recent US Department of Defense assessment of China’s nuclear weapons program contains information that suggests a rapid numerical increase in Chinese warhead numbers is unlikely (OSD 2022). China may not have enough plutonium, which it voluntarily stopped producing decades ago (Zhang 2018). The US assessment notes China could divert plutonium from its civilian nuclear program. But if Chinese leaders intend to match or exceed US numbers, it is highly unlikely they would attempt to quickly close a 15 to 1 gap by diverting plutonium from civilian stocks, especially since the NPT does not prohibit the five recognized nuclear weapons states from producing plutonium for weapons. China is not attempting to hide the new silos it is building. If China were to resume plutonium production to manufacture a large number of new warheads, it probably would not hide that either. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it does call into question US claims about a rapid buildup.

Chinese arms controllers repeatedly expressed their concern China’s comparatively small, truck-based fleet of missiles might be vulnerable to preemption. Their US interlocutors consistently refused to assure them the United States would not attempt to destroy or degrade China’s nuclear capabilities at the beginning of a military conflict. Advances in satellite imaging, radar, tracking, targeting, guidance, and precision munitions created the possibility the United States could accomplish that objective with conventional weapons. Leaked excerpts of the classified version of the 2002 US Nuclear Posture Review said these new conventional capabilities would become an integral part of US nuclear strategy and identified China as a target (FAS 2002). China’s new silos are an effective response to these long-standing Chinese concerns. The missiles they will contain will be less vulnerable to US preemption, especially conventional preemption.

Chinese arms controllers also repeatedly asked their US counterparts to assure them the United States will not use nuclear weapons first, but they refused. It is highly unlikely the United States would use nuclear weapons at the beginning of a military conflict to try to destroy or degrade China’s nuclear forces. That would require a large-scale nuclear attack spread out over huge swaths of the Chinese mainland that would have catastrophic humanitarian impacts and unpredictable political and military consequences for both countries and the rest of the world. US unwillingness to assure China it would not use nuclear weapons first is more likely driven by US concerns it could not prevail in a conventional war with China. Moreover, US defense officials, and US allies, still believe, as they did in the 1950s, that US threats to use nuclear weapons first can prevent Chinese leaders from using conventional military force. Given that it failed to work in the past, when China did not have nuclear weapons, it is hard to understand why US military planners, and US allies, cling to this belief.

The US ability to destroy or degrade Chinese nuclear forces with conventional weapons is closely associated with the US strategy of using what the Chinese leaders call “nuclear blackmail” to prevent China from using conventional military force. US threats to use nuclear weapons first seem more credible if there are doubts about China’s ability to retaliate. Moreover, US decision-makers may believe they could use nuclear weapons and avoid Chinese retaliation. China’s new silos will increase Chinese confidence in their ability to convince US decision-makers China can and will retaliate if the United States uses nuclear weapons first. This will, in turn, increase Chinese confidence in their ability to use conventional military force without undue concern about US nuclear use.

So, instead of seeking numerical superiority to fight and win a full-scale nuclear war, or seeking numerical parity to facilitate arms control negotiations, China’s new silos are more likely a long-delayed response – triggered by the breakdown of the Mao-Nixon rapprochement – to the perpetual US effort to credibly threaten to use nuclear weapons first to prevent China from using conventional military force. Put differently, the objective of Chinese nuclear weapons policy is what it has been since Chinese leaders began to think about developing nuclear weapons after the Korean War; to free Chinese decision-makers from the psychological pressure of US nuclear blackmail.

There is no indication that US decision-makers are prepared to accept vulnerability to Chinese nuclear retaliation or forgo the option of using nuclear weapons first to forestall defeat in a conventional war with China. The Biden administration’s Nuclear Posture Review did not include a no first use declaration and maintained funding new US tactical nuclear weapons and their deployment in East Asia. The US military, led by the outgoing Commander of the US Strategic Command Admiral Charles Richards, is campaigning for a US response to China’s new silos that attempts to restore the status quo ante (Richard 2022).

It is hard to imagine how that is possible. China already has a credible ability to retaliate. After its new silos are filled with missiles, it will be practically impossible for the United States to obtain an ability to prevent it.

There are influential US strategists who believe China may choose not to retaliate or, if they do, that the United States can limit the damage to an acceptable level (Roberts 2016). Chinese decision-makers would be shocked if their US counterparts risked Chinese retaliation by attacking first. One leading Chinese arms controller said he would advise the Chinese leadership to respond to any US first use, no matter how limited, by launching everything¹ The Chinese military has prepared to launch limited retaliatory strikes against one or more US military bases in the region. Their expectation is that these strikes would stop the United States from using nuclear weapons again. If the United States persists in relying on the first use of nuclear weapons to defeat China, the already significant probability of US decision-makers starting a nuclear war with unpredictable consequences is likely to increase.

The Prospects for a Nuclear Free Future in Northeast Asia

It is hard to be optimistic about the prospects for a nuclear weapons-free zone in Northeast Asia if individuals who think this way continue to have a decisive influence over US nuclear weapons policy. A nuclear weapons-free zone in Northeast Asia is a reasonable aspiration. Nuclear weapons-free zones have been adopted in many other areas of the world. But realizing it in Northeast Asia is going to require a break with the past, and a change within the present foreign and defense policy bureaucracies that sustain our counterproductive approaches to nuclear weapons and our security problems in Northeast Asia.

The way orthodox foreign and defense policy bureaucrats maintain their iron hold on US thinking about nuclear weapons is by controlling who is allowed into the bureaucracies that manage them. A perfect example is the case of an individual President Biden appointed to be his Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy. The person in that position often plays a leading role in helping a new administration review existing nuclear weapons policy. This individual was dismissed from that post – reassigned – because she thought differently about nuclear weapons policy (Sonne 2021). Her ideas were different than the career bureaucrats, not only in the United States but also in foreign defense bureaucracies, who put enormous pressure on President Biden to remove her, and he did.

While her dismissal was unfortunate, it is also a cause for hope. The panic over her appointment suggests appointing individuals with different ideas to influential posts can be an effective vehicle for change. So, one very important step people who want US nuclear weapons policies to change must take is to elect politicians who will not only appoint people with new ideas to key posts that influence nuclear weapons policy but have the courage to defend them from the career bureaucrats who will try to diminish or remove them.

Moreover, this change in the nature of the individuals who populate our foreign and defense policy bureaucracies needs to be broader than just nuclear weapons policy.

Meaningful change will require individuals who are capable of thinking differently about other cultures, who have experience living and working in other cultures, and who are what academics describe as cross-culturally competent (Bennett 2017). One simple but effective barometer of that competency is whether the thinking of foreign and defense policy professionals is ethnorelative instead of ethnocentric.

The distinction between the two is intuitive but extends well beyond the colloquial understanding of ethnocentricity. There are stages or degrees of intercultural sensitivity – Table 1 depicts six (OE (Organizing Engagement) 2023).

Table 1. Developmental model of intercultural sensitivity (Fleming n.d., ch.2.6).

Ethnocentric			Ethnorelative
Denial	Defense	Minimization	Acceptance	Adaptation	Integration
My cultural experience is the only one that is real and valid. There is little to no thought of “other”.	“We“ are superior and ”they” are inferior. One feels threatened and is highly critical. What is strange may be labeled as stupid.	Other cultures are trivialized or romanticized. One tends to deny differences (e.g. “color blind”) and only seek similarities.	I accept but may not agree with other cultures. Generally, I am curious and respectful.	I “see” world through different eyes and make intentional changes in my own behavior and values.	I easily move in and out of different cultural worldviews.

The descriptions suggests that decision-makers who choose to populate the US foreign and defense policy establishment with individuals on the ethnorelative end of this intercultural sensitivity scale would be highly likely to produce very different policies. They would be inclined to follow former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s advice and adopt an empathetic approach to US adversaries that could create opportunities to resolve, through dialogue and creative diplomacy, the security problems that have divided Northeast Asia since the end of the second world war. Orthodox US defense and foreign policy professionals don’t seem to believe that is possible. They behave as if the differences between the United States and its adversaries are irreconcilable and describe contemporary US-China relations as a competition that one side has to win and the other has to lose. That’s an indication of ethnocentric thinking, and it leaves US decision-makers few options other than to turn to military force, including threats to use nuclear weapons, to try to keep those differences from leading to war.

If a US president decided to affect this kind of transformation in the foreign and defense policy bureaucracy of the United States, there are some clear steps the US government can take to improve nuclear relations with China.

The first, and most important, is to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and to make its entry into force the number one priority in US nuclear weapons policy. The CTBT was the first international nuclear arms control treaty that China played a role in drafting. China spent more than a decade preparing for these negotiations and made considerable sacrifices to join. China conducted a much smaller number of nuclear tests than the United States, barely enough to complete reductions in the size of its warheads so they could be placed on the road-mobile, solid-fueled missiles that are the current backbone of China’s small nuclear force.

Moreover, Chinese leaders saw the completion of the CTBT as a beginning of a genuine US commitment to nuclear arms control that would be followed by the negotiation of a treaty to cut off the production of the fissile materials used to make nuclear warheads, and negotiations on the prevention of an arms race in outer space, negotiations that would most likely have included discussions of missile defenses.

The US Senate’s decision not to ratify the CTBT was an enormous blow to Chinese confidence in the US commitment to nuclear arms control and to international nuclear arms control negotiations in general. Talented, technically trained individuals in the Chinese military and the Chinese weapons labs who were anticipating and preparing for careers in international arms control were especially disappointed. Afterwards, the bureaucratic infrastructure China was just beginning to put in place to conduct those negotiations atrophied. Subsequent US decisions to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia and the US decision to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, further undermined Chinese confidence in the efficacy of nuclear arms control negotiations and any agreements they might produce.

US ratification of the CTBT, followed by an aggressive diplomatic push to get it entered into force could have a dramatic positive impact on Chinese views of international nuclear arms control and on Chinese nuclear weapons policies.

Another step the US government could take is to accept mutual vulnerability with China and give up on the impossible project of either trying to remain invulnerable, and on the equally questionable and horrifying strategy of imagining you can limit the potential damage from Chinese nuclear retaliation to an “acceptable” level. US decision-makers could also stop imagining they can use nuclear weapons first and stop relying on this option to try to relieve their anxieties about the US security relationship with China.

If the United States were willing to take these steps it would significantly improve the prospects for a nuclear weapons-free zone in Northeast Asia. It would increase those prospects by ending the current contest of wills between the United States and China over nuclear weapons and convert the US-China nuclear relationship into a more cooperative effort to reduce and eliminate their influence in the region. That would not be sufficient to allow for the establishment of a nuclear weapons-free zone in Northeast Asia, but it would certainly create better conditions for it to occur.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gregory Kulacki

Gregory Kulacki is the China Project Manager of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a Visiting Fellow at RECNA, Nagasaki University. His research focuses on China’s nuclear arms control policy and US extended nuclear deterrence policy in East Asia, where Gregory has lived and worked for the better part of the last thirty years.

Notes

¹ Comment made during a December 2022 on-line seminar conducted under Chatham House Rules..