Page 8 - AEI Insights Vol. 7 2021

AEI Insights, Vol 7, Issue 1, 2021

at a news conference in May 2019, made a similar statement. China refused to participate in
a trilateral arms control agreement (Fmprc.gov.2019).
It is noteworthy that while advising the United States and Russia to downgrade their nuclear
potentials to its level, China does not say what exactly this level is. One of the rare official
statements (if not the sole one) on that score was the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s statement,
published on April 27, 2004, that China’s nuclear arsenal was the smallest of all (Fact Sheet
China, 2004). Even in that case the Chinese Foreign Ministry did not specify if it was referring
to the quintet of the UN Security Council’s permanent members. If so, China’s nuclear arsenal,
according to official statistics, consisted of no more than 190 warheads (Britain’s level that
year). Such (understated according to most analysts) estimates, have also been mentioned by
a number of experts. For example, Harvard researcher Hui Zhang says China in 2011 had 166
nuclear warheads. There are other, higher estimates. For instance, Professor Phillip Karber of
Georgetown University believes that China has 3,000 warheads at its disposal (Karber, 2011),
while many other researchers call this in question.

The estimate offered by H. Kristensen and M. Korda of the Federation of American Scientists,
who issue annual world surveys of nuclear arms potentials, is shared by most researchers and
draws no objections from political circles in various countries, including the United States.
According to their calculations as for April 2020, the United States had 3,800 deployed and
non-deployed nuclear warheads, and Russia, 4,312 warheads. As for China, the same survey
says it has 320 non-deployed nuclear warheads (Kristensen and Korda, 2020).

While underscoring the importance of nuclear arms cuts by the United States and Russia to
China’s level, Beijing does not specify if this idea applies only to strategic or all nuclear
weapons. In the former case, if China’s approach is to be accepted, Russia and the United
States would have to slash their nuclear arsenals by 65%-75% (from 1,550 deployed nuclear
warheads in compliance with the rules of the still effective New START). But if the total
number of nuclear warheads on either side is to be counted, each country’s nuclear potential
would shrink by no less than 90%. Only after this will China be prepared to consider in earnest
its participation in nuclear arms control talks.
The United States and Russia can hardly find this suitable. At the same time, these countries
have not yet officially formulated their specific approaches to and basic provisions of
hypothetical trilateral talks and a future agreement on this issue. For the time being, these
issues are in the focus of experts’ attention in a number of countries, and they have over the
past few years offered a variety of possible formats and parameters of a future “multilateral”
treaty. In most cases, experts delve into certain aspects of a future agreement that might be
attractive to China. Very few think of what China might lose the moment it enters into nuclear
arms control talks or what military-political consequences might follow if China eventually
changed its mind regarding participation in such negotiations.
In my opinion, China’s demand for achieving the “comparability” of nuclear potentials as a
precondition for beginning a trilateral dialogue stems precisely from its evaluation of the
consequences of its participation in the negotiations. This stance is neither far-fetched nor
propagandistic, contrary to what some experts and politicians claim, but rests upon major
political, military and strategic cornerstones. Disregard for China’s arguments reduces to
nothing all efforts, above all those taken by Washington, to engage Beijing in nuclear arms
talks.
As far as the United States is concerned, the motives behind its attempts to persuade China to
join nuclear arms talks are not quite clear. There may be several possible considerations that

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