US seeks talks with China about its nuclear capability

WASHINGTON • The US has no nuclear hotline to China. The two countries have never had an in-depth conversation about American missile defences in the Pacific, nor China's experiments to blind US satellites in times 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 have each deployed five times more nuclear warheads than Beijing possesses.

US President Joe Biden is seeking to change all that. For the first time, Washington is trying to nudge Beijing's leadership into a conversation about its nuclear capability.

US 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.

Finally - maybe years from now - the two nations could begin discussing arms control, perhaps a treaty or something politically less complex, such as an agreement on common norms of behaviour.

In Washington, the issue has taken on more urgency than officials are acknowledging publicly, say officials who are involved.

Mr Biden's aides are driven by concern that a new arms race is hotting up over hypersonic weapons, space arms and cyber weapons, all of which could unleash a costly and destabilising spiral of move and countermove.

The fear is that an attack that blinds space satellites or command-and-control systems could quickly escalate, in ways that were not imaginable in the nuclear competitions of the Cold War.

China's capabilities could also pose a threat to Mr Biden's hopes of reducing the role of nuclear weapons in American defences.

In Mr Biden's virtual summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this month, the US President raised what the White House has euphemistically called "strategic stability talks".

Mr Biden's aides have said the effort is a tentative first step towards a far larger agenda, akin to the initial conversations about nuclear weapons that Russia and the US held in the 1950s.

The starting goal, they insist, is to simply avoid miscommunication and accidental war - even if it never rises to the level of a nuclear threat.

"You will see at multiple levels an intensification of the engagement to ensure that there are guard rails around this competition," Mr Jake Sullivan, Mr Biden's national security adviser, said in a presentation at the Brookings Institution the day after the virtual summit.

The nuclear relationship with Russia, he noted, is "far more mature, has a much deeper history to it". And it is now time to begin such conversations with China.

"It is now incumbent on us to think about the most productive way to carry it forward," he said.

In a sense, this is the revival of an old fear in Washington: In 1964, president Lyndon Johnson was so worried about the rise of another nuclear rival that he considered, but ultimately rejected, plans to conduct a pre-emptive strike or covert sabotage on China's main nuclear testing site at Lop Nor.

But China's decision to maintain a "minimum deterrent" for the past six decades - a nuclear force large enough to ensure that it could respond to a nuclear attack, but not nearly the size of America's or Russia's - largely knocked its nuclear programme off the Pentagon's list of top threats.

Now, its recent moves, from building new missile silo fields to testing new types of advanced weapons, come just as Mr Biden's aides are deep into an examination of US nuclear strategy that will be published in the coming months.

On Capitol Hill, the conversation has largely been about matching the Chinese investment, rather than rethinking the nature of the arms race.

"I'm very concerned," said Ms Rose Gottemoeller, an arms control official in several administrations who now teaches at Stanford University. "What's worrying me is the automaticity of the actions - of more nuclear weapons and more missile defences without thinking if there's a smarter way."

Added Ms Gottemoeller, who recently published a memoir of negotiating the New Start treaty with Russia: "This action-reaction cycle is in nobody's interest. We have to talk about how we're going to interrupt it."

NYTIMES