Analysis | First steps on a long path: Seizing the opportunity to reduce U.S.-China nuclear risks
Miles Pomper
China’s growing military might has raised alarm bells in Washington and led to close encounters with U.S. military ships and planes over contested territories in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits. Top U.S. officials have sought to bolster communication to prevent crises and calm relations and to initiate discussions on measures to build confidence and reduce nuclear risks within the bilateral relationship. To date, they largely have been rebuffed by China’s leaders, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken emerging empty-handed from a June meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping where he sought the restoration of military-military ties.
Nevertheless, changing circumstances — from the mutual desire to end the war in Ukraine to China’s slowing economy and the need to improve trade relations with the United States and Europe — may provide a window for compromise. Indeed, Blinken’s visit to Beijing is part of an accelerating series of meetings among top officials from the two countries, which will include a reciprocal visit to Washington by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and may culminate in a summit between Xi and President Biden. The two countries should take advantage of this opportunity to make progress on measures that would reduce instability and the risks that a crisis between them could escalate to the point of nuclear war.
In particular, the United States and Russia have accumulated a long history of arms control, risk reduction, and confidence-building measures — ranging from formal arms control agreements like the New START treaty to measures intended to provide greater transparency of conventional military movements on land and sea to minimize dangerous encounters and their potential escalation to the nuclear level. While the two countries cannot simply replicate these measures in the Asian context, there is a broad menu of options that Biden, Xi, and their teams could look to for inspiration.
Among these are steps to temper the growing missile race in the region. Both South and North Korea and Japan are greatly increasing the range and size of their missile stockpiles. China has developed a vast missile arsenal — including hypersonic missiles — that could threaten Taiwan and U.S. naval vessels in the region. In June remarks to the Arms Control Association, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan suggested China, one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, should join with the others in formalizing a missile launch notification regime akin to the one the United States and China each have with Russia but not with each other. Extending this regime throughout the Indo-Pacific would be another valuable measure.
Other measures could be considered regarding missiles, such as efforts to separate conventional and nuclear-armed systems to prevent inadvertently triggering a nuclear war. Meanwhile, inspections of wind tunnels used to test hypersonic missiles might help slow an incipient arms race in that technology.
China’s nuclear buildup has rattled U.S. policymakers. Sullivan estimates that China could have 1500 nuclear warheads by 2035 and finally develop an effective “triad” for delivering nuclear weapons of submarines, land-based (often mobile) launchers, and bombers. Sullivan also put forward some long-term goals regard to reducing risks in the nuclear arena, “From maintaining a “human-in-the-loop” for command, control, and employment of nuclear weapons — to establishing crisis communications channels among the [permanent members of the UN Security Council — China, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and France — to committing to transparency on nuclear policy, doctrine, and budgeting.”
Reaching an agreement on these issues is likely to prove more challenging. Even if Sullivan’s prediction proves correct, China will still be well below the level of U.S. or Russian nuclear stockpile numbers in another decade. In that context, Chinese officials see little benefit to arms control agreements which they believe would enshrine U.S. nuclear dominance and end the benefits they say from raising uncertainty among U.S. officials about the size, locations, and types of Chinese nuclear deployments.
As Sullivan indicated, building crisis communication channels would be a good first step, harkening back to the days of U.S-Russian détente during the Cold War. One of the first steps after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war was building a hotline between leaders for direct communication in a crisis. Subsequently, the development of U.S. and Russian Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers has provided ongoing and detailed communication about the two countries’ nuclear arsenals.
Moreover, China and the United States have already developed crisis communication channels. In 2014, Beijing and Washington agreed to establish two such channels: one setting rules of behavior for sea and air encounters, the other requiring advanced notification of major military activities. However, China has often failed to take advantage of these channels during regional standoffs.
Rather than formal agreements, the two sides could also explore reciprocal unilateral restraints on certain actions. For example, Beijing and Washington could mirror Soviet and U.S. Cold War pledges not to attach each other monitoring satellites and vow not to attack each other’s nuclear command, control, and communications facilities.
Washington could also look for opportunities to engage Chinese technical experts on challenging new subjects on the future arms control agenda, such as ways to monitor and verify stockpiles of nuclear warheads, which, unlike the delivery vehicles that carry them, have never been subject to U.S.-Russian arms control agreements.
Incentivizing China to see nuclear risk reduction as beneficial rather than detrimental will require skillful U.S. diplomacy to leverage pressure from allies in Europe and regional states, particularly those like Indonesia that are not clearly aligned with the other side. It is also likely to require linking nuclear issues with other issues in the security realm (such as missile defense) that China worries about. None of these steps will be easy, but in the next few months, there may be a rare opportunity to try and walk down what is sure to be a long road.
Miles Pomper is a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. He is also currently serving as a senior consultant to a Pacific Forum project on arms control, risk reduction, and confidence-building measures in the Indo-Pacific area.
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