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Zhoubo：It’s Absurd To Ask China To Disarm

The Chinese government sent Vice Premier Liu He to the U.S. in April with a brief to settle the tariff war between Beijing and Washington. But during an Oval Office news conference to address the progress of trade negotiations, President Trump abruptly changed the subject: “Between Russia and China and us, we’re all making hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is ridiculous.” Mr. Trump has since ordered his administration to prepare a push for new arms-control agreements with Russia and China.

If Mr. Liu was surprised by the pivot from trade to arms control, he wasn’t alone. To Chinese ears, Mr. Trump’s claims make no sense. Between them, the U.S. and Russia possess 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. China has fewer nuclear warheads (290) than France (300), according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

No wonder China’s Ministry of National Defense essentially laughed at the idea of a three-way deal on arms control involving the U.S. and Russia. For such an agreement to work, either the U.S. and Russia would need to bring their nuclear arsenals down to China’s level, or China would need to increase the size of its arsenal drastically. Neither scenario is realistic.

At the moment, the Trump administration is building up U.S. nuclear capability, developing low-yield warheads for submarine-launched ballistic missiles and tactical nukes for use in battlefield situations. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in March 2018 that Moscow is developing a nuclear-powered cruise missile with “unlimited range and unlimited ability to maneuver.”

Since China has pledged no first use of nuclear weapons and only seeks a small and effective deterrent force, it has to keep a larger arsenal of ground-based intermediate-range missiles for strategic equilibrium with other nuclear powers. In other words, if China reduces the number of its ground-based intermediate-range missiles, most of which are subject to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, it has to increase its nuclear-strike capabilities massively. Which is the “l(fā)esser evil” for the West?

China is no stranger to nuclear disarmament. In 1994 China presented a draft of a no-first-use policy to France, Russia, the U.S. and the U.K.—the four other countries in the nuclear club at the time. After India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998, China and the U.S. agreed to point their nuclear missiles away from one another. Other nuclear powers followed suit in 2000.

Do we really need another ineffective nuclear-disarmament treaty, as Mr. Trump suggested? The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons only recognizes the nuclear powers that conducted tests before January 1967. It hasn’t prevented India, Israel and Pakistan—not to mention North Korea—from becoming de facto nuclear states. The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons understandably reflects frustration over “the slow pace of nuclear disarmament,” but it probably won’t come into effect. So far only 23 nations have ratified the treaty, which requires 50 to go into force. Ironically, Japan refuses to join. The only country to have suffered a nuclear attack claims to see no use in the treaty.

Washington and Moscow need to take the lead on this issue and reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals if they want to live in a world with fewer weapons. The prospect of this happening appears remote. The U.S. is set to withdraw from the INF treaty on Aug. 2. North Korea refuses to make even superficial concessions without the promise of an economic payoff, and if Iran decides to go for a bomb, Saudi Arabia will follow. Dominoes in Egypt and Turkey would likely fall after that.

The number of nuclear warheads in the world has fallen from about 65,000 at the peak of the Cold War in the mid-1960s to 13,865 at the start of 2019. That’s progress but it didn’t happen by accident. It required brave leaders to make smart decisions.

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