There is much concern about a new nuclear arms race after the New START treaty between the United States and Russia expires on February 5. A two-prong approach to nuclear negotiations is highly advisable.
One prong would work to extend New START, though how to do so is a matter of hot debate. Ariel Petrovics recommends accepting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer of extension and then pursuing “the restoration of data exchanges, limited notifications, and a pathway toward reactivating inspections”.
Council on Foreign Relations fellows Erin Dumbacher and John Drennan alternatively stress “it is in the United States’ best interest to accept the Russian offer if Russia agrees to a follow-on negotiation process, at least a partial return to New START’s verification regime, and to reaffirm the treaty’s non-interference commitment.”
A second prong, however—one at least as important—is for the US to pursue concurrent talks with China. China’s current level of nuclear weapon holdings serves as an opportune benchmark for the US to downsize its stock of weapons to China’s current lower level.
If an informal but serious US-Sino mutual interest arose in capping holdings at around the current Chinese level, this would apply global pressure on Russia to seal a three-way deal at a new, lower equilibrium. Other countries would likely support major progress toward eliminating the spillover effects from a nuclear confrontation that is not even their war.
If New START continues as the benchmark, however, this may lull policymakers into insouciance about the need to make dramatic cuts en route to achieving the moral imperative of disarmament. Why not start working toward that goal before the vanishing opportunity with China peters out?
There are several reasons to tightly sequester pursuit of the two prongs. If talks proceed with China concurrently but independently of those with Russia, this would allow the US to understand China’s intents and priorities without complicating or distracting those discussions by prematurely including Russia at the table.
Should talks with China not yield tangible results, they would still open useful discussions to address misunderstandings between China and the US.
Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peaace working on nuclear policy, concludes after describing his views on these misunderstandings that “thoughtful debate on the long-term consequences of their own country’s policies, coupled with a nuanced understanding of their rival’s perspective, is essential to avoiding the catastrophic outcomes of strategic miscalculations.”
A second reason for sequestering the two prongs is that Russia has displayed extensive mixed signaling in its Ukraine negotiations. The US must be realistic about the prospects of making inroads with Russia on nuclear negotiations, given its vacillations and recalcitrance with respect to Ukraine. The history of those negotiations may mar prospects for substantive nuclear negotiations, at least while the Ukraine war continues.
Third, China and Russia are aligned in various ways. Yet Lyle Goldstein, director of Asia engagement at Defense Priorities, a think tank, suggests reasons to question the depth of this alignment.
Regardless, the US should be concerned about how the China-Russia alignment evolves. In this shifting period from two nuclear superpowers to three, superpower alignments imperil the nuclear balance, imperfect and fraught with risk as it was between just the US and Russia.
Fourth, China may have strong motivations to cap its nuclear weapons at its current level. Goldstein argues that “with substantial foresight, Chinese leaders have concluded that a new cold war, however overstated, would endanger China’s prosperity and national security.”
The Chinese Communist Party has benefited from its past oversight of year-over-year economic growth, but that momentum is now waning. Expenditures on an expensive arms race and future slower growth may challenge the party’s legitimacy.
Vast outlays to build up and maintain a nuclear arsenal on the scale of Russia and the US pose significant political risk for the CCP. Diana Choyleva, a senior fellow on China’s economy at the Asia Society’s Policy Institute’s Center for China analysis, argues that “China’s leadership can no longer rely on industrial policy and investment to deliver the output and income growth needed to ensure its political legitimacy.”
Making significant progress with China on nuclear negotiations will require signaling cooperation in certain other realms. For instance, a relaxation of tariffs could be used to incentivize nuclear negotiations and to moderate bilateral tensions.
Another potential area is selective nondefense technology sharing. One example has symbolic import in this context. China is reportedly making considerable progress on nuclear fusion as an energy source, according to a revealing article by four authors in the MIT Technology Review titled “Why the US and Europe could lose the race for fusion energy.”
It seems realistic to assume that neither China nor the US would enjoy a monopoly for long on advances in nuclear fusion research, leaving little reason not to cooperate. Eventual success in long-running nuclear fusion projects could help ameliorate one source, among many others, of friction between countries, namely the sourcing of energy.
There are many obvious impediments to the two-pronged approach. The Trump administration has shown no signs of developing the capacity for the difficult work of reaching its repeatedly stated goal of a nuclear weapon drawdown deal with China and Russia.
Indeed it has instead ventured into the controversial terrain of resuming nuclear testing. Moreover, if the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) from the Reagan era is any indication, Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile shield might impede negotiations.
Serhii Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, has claimed that “[Mikhail] Gorbachev’s offer to reduce or even eliminate the nuclear arsenals was conditioned on scrapping SDI completely. Reagan refused.” Finally, it is important to prescind the issues posed by Taiwan and Ukraine, as difficult as it may be to do so, lest these issues burden progress at this crucial juncture in nuclear negotiations.
