NUCLEAR WEAPONSThe Complications That China’s Build-Up Brings to Nuclear Balance
Any talks between the U.S. and Russia over renewing the expired nuclear arms agreement must soon include China as a nuclear superpower. Other aspects of the global nuclear arms landscape are not getting any simpler, either.
In late February, the United States and Russia found themselves without an agreement about the disposition of their major strategic nuclear weapons for the first time in more than 20 years.
The previous international agreement was called New START and applied to all strategic nuclear weapons on both sides. But with advances in time and technology and developments in these destructive technologies, the world will become increasingly unpredictable. If a new international agreement can be negotiated, in my view it may be the last such understanding in world history.
The central challenge to what are highly intricate technical and political negotiations is that from the US point of view they must soon include China as a nuclear superpower. In previous talks, China refused to discuss any of the technical issues involved because it had fewer land and sea-based intercontinental nuclear weapons than either the US or Russia. But by the early 2030s, it will have nuclear forces approaching those of each of its competitors. This will mean that, by about that time, Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons together will greatly outnumber the US’s. That would be an outcome unacceptable to Washington.
After more than 30 years of highly secret and tightly held technological developments, according to some nuclear experts we may be heading towards new diplomatic confrontations between China and the US about nuclear arms control. The best outcome could be another arms control agreement under which each of the three parties would hold dangerously high numbers of missiles. At the moment, however, China is standing by its view that, having so few long-range nuclear missiles compared with the US and Russia, it should enter into no arms control agreements.
Russia has 5,459 deployed and stored strategic nuclear weapons. The US has a comparable declared total of 5,177. The rest of the world scarcely rates. China has only 600 warheads but, according to the Pentagon, will have 3,000 warheads by 2030, due to its massive new program for intercontinental ballistic missiles. It will therefore be approaching US warhead numbers. To reach this predicted level China must prepare highly advanced engineering skills for designing new nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. It must also divert production resources to building expensive land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the huge vessels that carry them, and costly intercontinental bombers.
