This would involve America, Russia and China setting limits to the size of their nuclear arsenals
its first nuclear bomb 56 years ago, China has never revealed even a ballpark figure for the size of its arsenal. So recent debate on Chinese social media about the number of warheads the country ought to amass has been striking for its specificity. It began on May 8th with a suggestion by the editor of a nationalist tabloid in Beijing that China should expand its stockpile to 1,000 nuclear weapons.
Last year America pulled out of a treaty with Russia banning medium-range missiles fired from land. It did so ostensibly because of Russian cheating, but the Pentagon made no secret of its desire to match China’s unchecked build-up of such weapons. Now China casts a shadow over the one nuclear pact that still binds America and Russia, the Newtreaty. Signed in 2010, it caps “strategic” weapons and allows each side to inspect the other’s 18 times a year.
In a recent report by the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, David Santoro, Alexey Arbatov and Tong Zhao, experts from America, Russia and China respectively, suggest ways of breaking the impasse.
The problem, however, is that neither China nor Russia is keen on trilateral talks. On May 15th China again rejected the idea. This week Russia said that if America wanted to engage China on nukes, it should leave Russia out of it. In the past, Russian officials have said that if China were to join in, then Britain and France—American allies with 485 nuclear warheads between them—should be involved, too.
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