The Biden administration is preparing for nuclear arms control talks with China. The US wants to prevent a three-way arms race involving Beijing and Moscow.
The Wall Street Journal writes about it.
According to the interlocutors of the publication, the meeting is scheduled for November 6. These will be the first such talks since the presidency of Barack Obama. The WSJ notes, however, that the discussion does not mark the start of formal negotiations to impose limits on each sideʼs nuclear forces.
The talks will be chaired by the representative of the State Department, Mallory Stewart, and the head of the arms control department of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sun Xiaobo.
On September 30, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that differences over Taiwan are the biggest obstacle to improving US-China relations. However, according to him, Beijing wants to "stabilize these relations".
China signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty during the Clinton presidency. But under Trumpʼs presidency, China has refused to join talks with the US and Russia on formal limits on nuclear forces, allegedly because its nuclear arsenal is much smaller than that of Washington and Moscow.
According to the Pentagon, as of May 2023, China had more than 500 operational nuclear warheads. It is likely to deploy more than a thousand warheads by 2030, and then continue to build up its arsenal until 2035.
The Biden administration has been trying to engage Russia in separate arms control talks after Moscow suspended its participation in the Strategic Offensive Arms Reduction Treaty (SNO-3/New START), which it signed with the United States in 2010. Russia has not yet responded to the White Houseʼs offer.
- On November 1, it became known that the teams of Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed on a meeting of leaders in San Francisco in November, but important details still need to be agreed.
- The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said in an annual report that nuclear-weapon states are modernizing and building up their arsenals. The USA and Russia own almost 90% of the nuclear weapons in the world. Their combined 2,000 warheads are in a state of increased combat capability.