U.S. Wants To Have Talks With China Over Nuclear Arms

DF-31A missiles, the tailor-made launch vehicles for Chinese nuclear warheads, seen during a military parade in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Photo: Xinhua 

 DNYUZ/New York Times: As China Speeds Up Nuclear Arms Race, the U.S. Wants to Talk 

The United States has no nuclear hotline to Beijing. The two countries have never had a serious conversation about American missile defenses in the Pacific, or China’s experiments to blind U.S. satellites in time of conflict. 

And Chinese officials have consistently rejected the idea of entering arms control talks, shutting down such suggestions by noting — accurately — that the United States and Russia each have deployed five times more nuclear warheads than Beijing possesses. 

President Biden is seeking to change all that. 

For the first time, the United States is trying to nudge China’s leadership into a conversation about its nuclear capability. U.S. officials, describing the American strategy, say Mr. Biden and his top aides plan to move slowly — focusing the talks first on avoiding accidental conflict, then on each nation’s nuclear strategy and the related instability that could come from attacks in cyberspace and outer space.  

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WNU Editor: China has made it very clear in the past that they have no interest in limiting the growth of their nuclear stockpiles. But if the U.S. and China do engage in talks, the first thing that they should agree to is a Washington-Beijing nuclear hotline.