As China Speeds Up Nuclear Arms Race, the U.S. Wants to Talk

[donkeykong]

China can build tens of thousands of nukes and no one can do a thing to stop it lol

 

[Pakistan Space Agency]

The US wants to talk after deploying THAAD in South Korea, turning India into cannon fodder and signing AUKUS with Australia.

Is this an attempt to talk from a position of strength or due to failure of deterrence?

 

[Beidou2020]

China should not talk until nuclear warhead parity is reached. Nuclear weapons is the only guarantor of peace. China need to continue to advance in the development of nuclear delivery capabilities.

 

[Oldman1]

Remember .....

The Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects (PPWT).

Beijing and Moscow submitted this to the United Nations in 2014.

United States opposes this treaty to avoid any restrictions on their advantage over China and Russia.

6 years later and does US feel safer now ?

Russia and China Seek to Tie America’s Hands in Space

Biden should avoid the treaty trap set by Moscow and Beijing.

foreignpolicy.com

Russia and China Seek to Tie America’s Hands in Space
Biden should avoid the treaty trap set by Moscow and Beijing.

Washington should also advance nascent efforts to establish rules of the road in space. “There are really no norms of behavior in space,” Gen. John Raymond, the chief of space operations at U.S. Space Force, said this month. “It’s the wild, wild West.”

In a notable and positive step, the U.N. General Assembly passed a British-introduced resolution in December that seeks to establish “norms, rules and principles of responsible behaviours” in space, which could reduce the chances for dangerous miscalculation.

The vote was 164 in favor, including the United States—and a mere 12 opposed.

Any guesses regarding who voted no? You guessed it: China and Russia. They were joined by their friends Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba.

So much for a Chinese and Russian desire to pursue constructive and peaceful policies in space. Their duplicity continues.

I think there is nothing to talk. US is a dishonest actor. Cannot be trusted.

Can't trust the Russians either since they violated the INF Treaty and we pulled out. Russia was mad and so was China even though they have no say in the treaty.

The US wants to talk after deploying THAAD in South Korea, turning India into cannon fodder and signing AUKUS with Australia.

Is this an attempt to talk from a position of strength or due to failure of deterrence?

Oh so when U.S. makes allies it's a weakness but when China does it its smart.

a reasonable precondition for negotiation would be: abolish all US military bases east of Gulf, west of Hawaii

A reasonable pre condition for negotiation would be to abolish all military forces on China's artificial island and retract their claims in SCS as well as the Arctic Ocean.

 

[Nan Yang]

As China Speeds Up Nuclear Arms Race, the U.S. Wants to Talk
The Pentagon thinks Beijing may build 1,000 or more weapons by 2030. But it’s the new technologies that worry strategists.

China’s DF-17 hypersonic ballistic missiles have warheads that can zero in on targets at more than five times the speed of sound.Credit...Roman Pilipey/EPA, via Shutterstock

By David E. Sanger and William J. Broad
Nov. 28, 2021Updated 7:45 p.m. ET

The United States has no nuclear hotline to Beijing. The two countries have never had an in-depth, 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.

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 behavior.

In Washington, the issue has taken on more urgency than officials are acknowledging publicly, according to officials who are involved. Mr. Biden’s aides are driven by concern that a new arms race is heating up over hypersonic weapons, space arms and cyberweapons, all of which could unleash a costly and destabilizing spiral of move and countermove. The fear is that an attack that blinded 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 President Biden’s hopes of reducing the role of nuclear weapons in American defenses.

In some ways, Washington is focused on the progress of China’s nuclear capability in a way that it has not been since Mao first tested a weapon in 1964.

In his virtual summit meeting earlier this month with Xi Jinping, China’s president, who clearly has sought to present himself as a epoch-defining leader alongside Mao, Mr. Biden raised what the White House has euphemistically called “strategic stability talks.”

In interviews, Mr. Biden’s aides have said the effort is a tentative first step toward a far larger agenda, akin to the initial conversations about nuclear weapons that Russia and the United States 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 guardrails around this competition,” 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.” After the summit meeting between Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi, he added, it is 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, 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 assure that it could respond to a nuclear attack, but not nearly the size of America’s or Russia’s — largely knocked its nuclear program 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 American nuclear strategy that will be published in coming months.

The review, which every new administration is required to undertake in its first year or so, will contain key decisions — including whether to go ahead with a modernization plan that by the last comprehensive estimate, four years ago, looked likely to cost 1.2 trillion dollars over the next 30 years. The future of those plans has been the subject of furious lobbying campaigns, especially among the nation’s top defense contractors.

Earlier this month the Pentagon concluded that the size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal may triple by 2030, to upward of 1,000 warheads. But the administration’s concern is not just the number of weapons — it is the new technology, and particularly how Chinese nuclear strategists are thinking about nontraditional arms.

When the Chinese launched a hypersonic missile in July, circling the globe once and then deploying a maneuverable glide vehicle that could zig and zag on an unpredictable path and deliver a weapon anywhere on earth, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that the U.S. was “very close” to a “Sputnik moment.” But in the weeks since, American officials have been reluctant to say what, exactly, about that experiment so rattled them — beyond the fact that it revealed a technological sophistication that they did not know the Chinese had achieved.

The hypersonic nature of the missile — meaning it can move at more than five times the speed of sound — was the least interesting element of the test. All nuclear missiles go at least that fast. But the stubby glider it released — which could hold a nuclear warhead — was designed to evade the United States’ primary missile interceptors, which can operate only in outer space. (In recent weeks, the Pentagon issued a contract for design work on technology to intercept the gliders, but that would be years away.)

It’s unclear whether China plans to deploy a hypersonic weapon in the future, and, even if it does, whether they would be armed with nuclear warheads. But General Milley’s deputy, Gen. John Hyten, who is retiring as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told reporters in October that the Chinese military had conducted “hundreds” of hypersonic tests, compared with nine by the United States.

General Hyten said the test, combined with Beijing’s other moves, such as digging hundreds of new silos for long-range missiles, suggest the Chinese government may now be interested in developing a nuclear first-strike capability, not just the minimum deterrent.

“Why are they building all of this capability?” he asked on CBS News. While it is not clear what Chinese strategists intend, he said, the hypersonic glide vehicle appears to be “a first-use weapon.”

Inside the White House and the Pentagon, there is no unanimity on that point. Mr. Biden has long been wary of assessments that could be intended to drive up the Pentagon’s budget — and certainly American defense contractors, their executive offices jammed with former senior military officers, have a vested interest in describing a new threat that could lead to billions of dollars in new investments.

But even some skeptics agree that the Chinese hypersonic test, along with antisatellite technologies that could blind American early-warning and command-and-control systems, suggest a major rethinking of American nuclear strategy and plans is overdue.

Gen. John Raymond, who commands the newly created United States Space Force, recently told New York Times reporters and editorial writers that in the case of a crisis, he has no direct channel for communicating with his Chinese counterpart — a dangerous situation if, for instance, an accidental collision with a Chinese spacecraft were to be misperceived as an act of aggression.

That appeared to be at the core of Mr. Sullivan’s first concern: establishing lines of communication between the two militaries, of the kind the United States and Russia have had for decades. (He avoided the use of the word “nuclear” in his talk, a reflection of how space, cyberweapons and other high technologies need to be part of the conversation, Mr. Biden’s senior aides say.)

On Capitol Hill, the conversation so far is largely about matching the Chinese investment, rather than rethinking the nature of the arms race.

“I’m very concerned,” Rose Gottemoeller, an arms control official in several administrations who now teaches at Stanford University, said in an interview. “What’s worrying me is the automaticity of the actions — of more nuclear weapons and more missile defenses without thinking if there’s a smarter way.”

Mr. Xi and Mr. Biden, American officials said, agreed to further conversations — but there was no commitment on how deep those would go. Asked whether the talks would include the topic of arms control, the National Security Council, in a statement, said, “No. What we are seeking — and what Jake Sullivan spoke about — are conversations with empowered interlocutors” about “guardrails to reduce risk or the chance of miscalculation.”

The history of those conversations is not encouraging. For years, across several administrations, the United States tried to get Chinese officials to talk about how they would secure nuclear weapons in North Korea if the nation collapsed. The effort was to avoid a collision among Chinese, South Korean and American forces seeking to find and secure loose weapons. The Chinese have always demurred, perhaps for fear of being caught talking about the possibility of the North’s collapse.

It is possible, many arms control experts say, that the Chinese buildup is motivated by the deployment of U.S. missile defenses in the Pacific — land-based systems in California, Alaska, Guam and South Korea, and aboard ships patrolling off Japan and the Korean Peninsula. The U.S. has always insisted that these systems are designed to deter North Korea. But the Chinese government has long voiced worries that North Korea’s nuclear program provides a convenient excuse for the United States to build a system aimed at containing Chinese nuclear weapons.

China and the United States have never engaged in a detailed discussion of missile defenses in the Pacific. But the hypersonic test may force the issue, independent experts say, because it is clear Beijing’s ambitions are expanding.

Even before the test, American officials and military contractors were trying to figure out new defenses against the hypersonic warheads. That would be more complex than intercepting an intercontinental ballistic missile, a project that has already cost more than $300 billion over several decades and yielded only episodic success. This month, Raytheon, Northrop and Lockheed won Pentagon awards to compete with one another in building an interceptor seen as agile enough to knock out a hypersonic glider. The defensive weapon is billed as the first of its kind.

The Pentagon also has embarked on a vast effort to loft up to 500 satellites that would provide improved means of tracking ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles. The swarm is considered crucial for establishing an end-to-end system that would identify hypersonic attacks and direct interceptors onto flight paths that would let them destroy the incoming gliders.

It all worries Ms. Gottemoeller, who recently published a memoir of negotiating the New Start treaty with Russia. “This action-reaction cycle is in nobody’s interest,” she said. “We have to talk about how we’re going to interrupt it.”

As China Speeds Up Nuclear Arms Race, the U.S. Wants to Talk (Published 2021)

The Pentagon thinks Beijing may build 1,000 or more weapons by 2030. But it’s the new technologies that worry strategists.

www.nytimes.com

Remember this......... In 2002, George W Bush unilaterally withdrew United States from the Anti Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty.

The obvious target was China. At that time China only have about 20 missiles that can reached United States. The quantity never change for years and years. They were all in fixed silos and their war head were kept away from the missiles. Expert warn Bush that China would response.

Well, fast forward 17 years. China's DF-41, the world's most powerful ICBM enter service in 2019. Each DF-41 has 10 warhead and they are mobile.


Now........ does George W Bush feels safer now ? I guess he is already retired and does not care. What about the rest of US ?

 

[Stranagor]

US is just passing time through empty rhetoric. Politicians and bureaucracy, too, need to look like they are doing something.

 

[SuvarnaTeja]

The US wants to talk after deploying THAAD in South Korea, turning India into cannon fodder and signing AUKUS with Australia.

Is this an attempt to talk from a position of strength or due to failure of deterrence?

It is too late. US thought that they could balkanize China like the Soviet Union but China had leaders of steel and did not have any doves like Gorbachev. By the time US realized that its policy of engaging with China failed, China had surpassed the US Economically, Technologically and Militarily. US is currently at step 4. It will go into depression next and finally reconcile and yield the global leadership to China.

 

[Stranagor]

It is too late. US thought that they could balkanize China like the Soviet Union but China had leaders of steel and did not have any doves like Gorbachev. By the time US realized that its policy of engaging with China failed, China had surpassed the US Economically, Technologically and Militarily. US is currently at step 4. It will go into depression next and finally reconcile and yield the global leadership to China.



View attachment 797887

Depression/confusion may reflect badly on domestic governance, as well.

 

[SuvarnaTeja]

Depression/confusion may reflect badly on domestic governance, as well.

US is confused if it should continue as a democracy or if it should adopt Chinese model of government to compete with China.

 

[Stranagor]

US is confused if it should continue as a democracy or if it should adopt Chinese model of government to compete with China.

They are right wing - even their left. I do not think they can go socialist/communist.

I can see them going fascist more comfortably. After all fascism is simply extreme rightist liberalism.

 

[SuvarnaTeja]

They are right wing - even their left. I do not think they can go socialist/communist.

I can see them going fascist more comfortably. After all fascism is simply extreme rightist liberalism.

It is irrelevant if it would be left wing or right wing. if It has be a totalitarian government to compete with China. US needs a leader comparable to Hitler's or Stalin's Charisma.

 

[Beidou2020]

US is in panic. They have scrambled minds because of the fear of China.

First they tried to subvert China using internal colour revolution but that failed. They tried to get the liberals to revolt against the CPC. When that didn’t work as planned, they tried to get Tibetans. When that failed, they tried Uighurs. When that failed, they tried in Hong Kong. Now even that has failed after the National Security Law destroyed their Hong Kong plans. Now they have turned to their final option which is Taiwan.

They want to destabilise China to slow down the economic juggernaut. If the economy slows, the technological development slows. Both of these things will cause military buildup to slow.

None of their plans are working. CPC is defusing all their bombs. This is why they are so angry. Also Xi’s anti-corruption policy destroyed all their networks, sources, allies to subvert the CPC.

CPC is one tough nut to crack.

 

[MH.Yang]

There is no reason why China has fewer nuclear weapons than USA and Russia. If USA wants to negotiate, the USA should wait until the number of our nuclear weapons is equal.

 

[Han Patriot]

Outside of the Ottomans, Western military has engaged with militaries elsewhere with absolute and overwhelming technological superiority after the Mongols routed them in the 13th Century ,till today.
From the bronze-age Incas and Aztecs, to the bowmen of North America, the assegai warriors in Africa, the charging Pathan swordsmen , Dao-wielding Qing soldiers, the boomerangs of Australia to the outmatched Iraqis and Talibanis.. all were failed by their inferior weapons.
On the single occasion a non-Western nation achieved technological parity in arms ( Imperial Japan) the much vaunted Western military folded like umbrellas on contact.
So the very thought of a non-Western country achieving parity in the most powerful weapon systems ( nuclear) is making them sweat profusely. Their protests have nothing to do with safety or security, everything to do with their entitled mentality.
Towards this end they are using the media,
" leaks" , " Anonymous sources " et all to mentally prepare the Chinese to think below a figure of 1000 nuclear warheads so that they retain absolute dominance.
The Chinese I am sure has seen through this tactic. They should present a faith accompli of a minimum 5k warheads ( ie parity).. the Anglos will then lose their smug countenance and will either start behaving themselves, or bankrupt themselves trying to pile on more.

Gunpowder was invented in China, the first cannons were created in China and the first handgonne the predessor of the musket was created in China. No we did not fight with Dao alone when the West attacked Canton, there were already inventing gatling guns mate.

 

[Shotgunner51]

The quantity never change for years and years.

Each DF-41 has 10 warhead

That's why I said there's no need for talk, US is the one peddling the decades-old narrative "China only has a few hundred large DF-5A warheads" (each yield 3.3~5 megatons TNT eqv), zero MIRV strategic warheads, zero tactical, why they even bother to ask for a talk?

P.S.: Note not just DF-41 is MIRVed, so are DF-5B, DF-31AG, JL-2, etc. Only the SRBM, CM, some MRBM, smaller HGV (e.g. DF-17) and of course veteran DF-5A are single warhead config.