The United States and China Still Need to Talk About Nuclear Weapons

Shortly before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was slated to depart for Beijing on the Biden administration’s first cabinet-level visit, the trip was postponed. The last-minute schedule change came after a Chinese surveillance balloon was confirmed to be floating above sensitive U.S. military sites, including potentially an active nuclear missile silo field in Montana. Over the weekend, the balloon was shot down by a U.S. F-22 fighter jet once the expected debris no longer posed a threat to civilians.

The incident is reminiscent of those that occurred during the Cold War involving the United States and the Soviet Union—and it comes at a time when many are debating whether Washington and Beijing are now headed toward a similar relationship. Blinken’s now-postponed visit was an attempt to follow up on the Biden-Xi meeting at the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, last year. Encouragingly, the summit provided the best recent opportunity for diplomacy between the United States and China—one that could provide some answers on how the two countries can best avoid a “new Cold War” and reduce the risks of unnecessary conflict and inadvertent escalation.

As was true during the Cold War, spy balloons are not the only things looming over the fraught relationship between the United States and China—nuclear weapons are, too. In addition to ever-increasing tensions over Taiwan, it is no secret that China’s ambition for a diversified nuclear arsenal and wider military modernization is accelerating, with Beijing expanding strategic and conventional forces to back up its “wolf warrior” diplomacy.

Since university researchers made it public two years ago that China is developing extensive missile silo fields and Beijing shocked U.S. intelligence services by testing a hypersonic fractional orbital bombardment system just weeks later, there has been a growing conversation on how Washington can adequately deter Beijing. However, there is another side that cannot be ignored: The United States and China must return to talks at the earliest available opportunity to discuss their shared responsibility to reduce the risk of nuclear war through crisis management and arms control.

Regardless of the reasoning, what the U.S. government has done so far has not been enough to get China to consider an alternative path. Policymakers in Washington have barely discussed how U.S. policies factor into Beijing’s calculations and, most importantly, how Chinese actions could be positively influenced away from their current arms-race trajectory.

China’s calculation of escalation risk is adapting to today’s geopolitical and technological realities, which have both increased the chance of conventional wars crossing the nuclear threshold.

Such developments should prompt Chinese leaders to speak with their U.S. counterparts directly about practical ways to manage potential crises and conflicts. However, a lack of political willpower seems to stand in the way of a sustained, structured bilateral dialogue on these issues.

The avoidance of nuclear weapons use during the Cold War resulted from a substantial amount of knowledge that could only be accrued through meaningful diplomatic, military, and scientific cooperation. However, any similar cooperation in the nuclear sphere between the United States and China at the moment will depend on whether China feels that such initiatives will disadvantage it or leave it vulnerable to manipulation. Those fears are why China has historically avoided crisis management and arms control measures.

However, times are changing, and such avoidance is increasingly untenable. Crisis management conversations should aim to result in formalized risk reduction measures, which are also inherently arms control measures. For example, the United States and China could revive the Crisis Communications Working Group that was only convened once in 2020 before China canceled the subsequent meeting in 2021. The group could work to address how the decades-old and seemingly moribund leader-level hotline and largely suspended military communication channels can be revived, expanded, and protected from technical threats. In particular, technical projects to make such hotlines more resilient in the face of emerging technologies such as AI-generated deepfakes would also be useful.

Blinken must make it clear to the Chinese that while the Biden administration is seriously interested in diplomacy, it will need proactive and positive Chinese engagement to sustain it. After all, many skeptics feel that they have seen this movie before. Direct conversations between the United States and China on strategic stability—namely, creating a stable security situation in which both sides are discouraged from initiating a first nuclear strike—have remained in a stage of infancy for too long. Across the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, high-level political commitments to pursue more robust bilateral talks resulted in only a handful of engagements.

The Trump administration subsequently burned already-fragile bilateral bridges, including on the nuclear front as Beijing became even more uncomfortable with the concept of arms control because of the coercive nature of U.S. tactics to get China to come to the table. Given that China only has a fraction of either the U.S. or Russian arsenals—currently estimated at around 350 warheads and growing, compared to approximately 5,500 U.S. and Russian warheads each—Beijing opposed calls to join quantitative limits unless the United States and Russia came down to its level.

As a result, in recent years conversations on nuclear issues between the United States and China have primarily taken place in a multilateral setting. However, the P5 Process—the multilateral forum for the five nuclear weapons states under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—has been substantially slowed down due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While P5 officials have met in Dubai in recent days to continue discussions on their positions on risk reduction, identifying common ground and practical measures to take forward as a collective will be difficult.

While the war in Ukraine has complicated such efforts, it has also highlighted to the Chinese—who have reportedly lobbied Russian President Vladimir Putin to step away from the nuclear brink—that cooperating in this area can improve China’s image as a responsible nuclear power, especially in the eyes of non-nuclear weapons states.

Strong communication on nuclear issues should therefore be seen as a central element of President Joe Biden’s bilateral agenda with China. While it may be too heavy a lift to obtain Chinese agreement on a full-fledged strategic stability dialogue immediately, the Biden administration should prioritize crisis management in the wake of the spy balloon incident. Nuclear risk reduction measures should be seen as a win-win proposition, just as they were during the Cold War.

Learning about each country’s risk perceptions would help sharpen the focus of future talks on the specific issues Washington and Beijing can work together on to lower tensions and reduce the likelihood of blundering into war because of misperception or miscommunication. As was true following the Cuban missile crisis, the pursuit of crisis management tools can pave the way for deeper arms control while protecting diplomatic space on various other key issues.

Chinese leaders must understand that engaging in direct discussions on managing risk with adversaries such as the United States is not an aspect of great-power competition but the very foundation of it. In order to improve chances for crisis and arms-racing stability, China’s unwillingness to discuss obligations that could provide guardrails around nuclear weapons use needs to change. If such efforts to reduce risks prove successful at building trust, qualitative (rather than quantitative) limits that focus on restraint from deploying certain types of weapons systems might also be of mutual interest in the long term. In the meantime, both sides lack a sober understanding of the other side’s nuclear intentions and have to start somewhere.

While luck often favors the bold, it also has a habit of running out. Crisis management would be a mutually beneficial and positive first step in the arms control process. As deterrence structures are made more complex and unstable, there is no sane option but for nuclear nations such as the United States and China to renew their diplomatic efforts. If they don’t, there will never be any hope of reducing the dangers that nuclear weapons pose. In the words of Stanford nuclear physicist Siegfried Hecker, Washington and Beijing are simply “doomed to cooperate.”