China Plays Hardball With US in Nuclear Arms Talks

Chinese officials were less than forthcoming on Monday when they sat with American counterparts for their first nuclear arms control talks since the Obama administration, A U.S. official said.

"The Chinese delegation did not respond substantively," the unnamed official told Reuters after a consultation between Mallory Stewart, the assistant secretary of state for arms control, and her Beijing counterpart, Sun Xiaobo.

China's nuclear arsenal is rapidly expanding, according to running assessments by the Pentagon. The United States is concerned about Beijing's intentions as military tensions rise in the Taiwan Strait as well as in the contested South China Sea. Observers also worry that China's leaders may draw the wrong conclusions about the Kremlin's nuclear saber-rattling in Ukraine.

Arms control dialogue is a mechanism through which the world's nuclear powers hope to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation. For America and China in particular, it is also one of the rare areas where bilateral talks have resumed ahead of Chinese leader Xi Jinping's widely expected U.S. visit next week.

"The United States highlighted the need to promote stability, help avert an unconstrained arms race, and manage competition so that it does not veer into conflict," the U.S. State Department said publicly about the November 6 exchange.

Behind the scenes, however, Beijing's tendency to play its cards close to its chest appeared to frustrated Washington.

"I wouldn't say we learned anything new from them or that they delved into a great amount of detail regarding their nuclear force," the U.S. official told Reuters.

China's Foreign Ministry on Wednesday described the discussion as an "in-depth, candid and constructive exchange of views," a now boilerplate phrase deployed for most types of security-related dialogue.

"China elaborated on its position and policies on arms control and nonproliferation issues, emphasizing that China and the United States should carry out dialogue and cooperation based on mutual respect," Wang Wenbin, a ministry spokesperson, said at a regular press conference in Beijing.

The U.S. Defense Department's latest assessment of Chinese hard power—commonly known as the China Military Power Report—said Beijing now had over 500 nuclear-capable warheads. China was likely to develop up to 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2030, it said.

China says it is modernizing its nuclear weapons forces for defensive purposes. Beijing maintains its arsenal remains at a "minimum level required by national security," according to its Foreign Ministry.

Arms control talks, despite Beijing's expanding capabilities, was important to reduce the existing level of risk, former senior U.S. official Michele Flournoy said in a panel discussion in Taipei on Wednesday.

"But I do think increasing dialogue, whether restarting military-to-military dialogue or dialogue on arms control, that's very important," said Flournoy, who was the Pentagon's policy chief during the Obama administration.

"We need to find ways to reduce the level of tension and to reduce the level of risk, and to create space for cooperation where it's in our mutual interest," she said at this year's Taipei Security Dialogue, organized by Taiwan's top military think tank, the Institute for National Defense and Security Research,

Officially, China has yet to elaborate on its reservations about more substantive nuclear dialogue. Unofficially, however, authoritative voices and Chinese experts have explained more.

In an editorial published on Tuesday, China Daily, the state-owned English-language newspaper, said Beijing's reluctance was linked to a U.S. proposal involving Russia.

"Beijing was reluctant to join nuclear arms talks as Washington proposed they be trilateral talks with Moscow also participating," the paper said, in a piece that was republished by the People's Liberation Army's official website.

The Trump administration in 2020 had floated trilateral arms control talks with Moscow and Beijing to propose a treaty that would limit the expansion of their respective nuclear arsenals. Beijing rejected the idea, which would've meant acquiescing to U.S. accusations about its nuclear buildup—and because it would've resulted in a cap on its relatively small strategic forces.

Washington and Moscow previously agreed to limit the development of their warheads under the New Start Treaty of 2011. Russia withdrew from the treaty in February as the tensions ran high over the Ukraine war, and President Vladimir Putin has since engaged in nuclear brinkmanship by hinting at nuclear weapons use against Kyiv.

Guo Xiaobing, an arms control expert with the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations—run by the country's state security ministry—said U.S.-China talks were incomparable with previous U.S.-Russia dialogue.

"Since China has a nuclear arsenal that is not comparable in size with those of Russia and the U.S., its being considerably smaller, and its nuclear weapons being purely for defense purposes, Beijing considered trilateral talks inappropriate," Guo wrote in the state-run tabloid the Global Times.

Guo said consultations would be "focused more on transparency and crisis communication" as the two sides assess each other's intentions on nuclear arsenal expansion.

A yearlong review by a congressional commission recently concluded that the U.S. would face a dual threat of nuclear-armed Russia and China. Its report recommended Washington to increase the pace of nuclear force modernization.

More than one nuclear policy expert believes China has serious concerns about America's willingness to deploy nuclear weapons.

"The renewed U.S. emphasis on low-yield tactical nuclear weapons has further fueled China's apprehension that Washington intends to make its nuclear weapons more usable," Tong Zhao, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, wrote in an op-ed published on Monday by Foreign Policy magazine.

Zhao recommended the U.S. put aside its domestic debate about a non-first-use (NFU) policy to hold risk-reduction dialogue with China.

China has maintained an NFU policy for decades and pledged only to use its nuclear weapons to retaliate against an attack by another nuclear-armed state. In contrast, the U.S. has a "calculated ambiguity" policy to give Washington more of a "robust deterrent than an unequivocal rejection of first use," said Zhao.