On Monday, the United States and China talked nukes — a rare bit of engagement that offers a teeny, tiny glimmer of optimism amid tensions between the two powers.
The arms control discussions, first reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, and confirmed by the White House National Security Council and State Department, come ahead of an anticipated meeting between President Joe Biden and China’s leader Xi Jinping later this month.
These are the first such talks on nuclear arms control since the Obama administration. And while there is no real expectation of any major breakthrough, it’s still a big deal that the two countries are talking, and talking about nukes in particular — especially given China’s rapid nuclear weapons buildup, the lack of crisis communications between the US and China, and the escalating nuclear threats worldwide, most notably from Russia around the war in Ukraine.
This is also a big deal because of what it signals about the balance of nuclear weapons in the world — who has them, how many, and what risks that raises. China has historically resisted nukes talks on a bilateral and multilateral basis because its arsenal is still a fraction of the US or Russia’s, and it fretted that such transparency would also impose limitations on its own capabilities. “On some level, this is a recognition that China is moving into the category that the United States and Russia — previously the Soviet Union — were in and are in with regard to their nuclear arsenal, and I think that is a significant historical shift,” said Jacob Stokes, senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.
“They’re moving into that reluctantly — backing into it rather than shouting it from the rooftops,” he added. But it still is a signal that the nuclear balance among major powers is shifting, and the architecture around that needs to change, too.
Ambitions for these talks are pretty tempered —…
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