China resists growing international pressure to join discussions with the United States and Russia for a trilateral nuclear arms pact.<\/b>
\nThe Chinese Foreign Ministry on Thursday said Beijing will resist growing international pressure to join discussions with the United States and Russia for a trilateral nuclear arms pact to replace the expiring New START treaty.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said at his Thursday press briefing that China found the expiration of New START \u201cregrettable,\u201d because the treaty was \u201cvital to global strategic stability, and there is widespread concern over the impact on the international nuclear arms control system and global nuclear order after the treaty expires.\u201d
Lin said that China nevertheless has no intention of joining negotiations for a new treaty because Beijing\u2019s \u201cdefensive nuclear strategy\u201d and \u201cpolicy of \u2018no first use\u2019 of nuclear weapons\u201d supposedly immunize it from needing to join any arms treaty, even though China has one of the fastest-growing nuclear arsenals in the world.
\u201cRussia has proposed that both Russia and the U.S. continue to adhere to the central limits of the treaty. China hopes the U.S. will actively respond to Russia\u2019s proposal, work out a responsible solution to the treaty\u2019s expiration, and resume strategic stability dialogue with Russia at an early date,\u201d he said.
China has insisted its nuclear arsenal is on a \u201ctotally different scale as those of the United States and Russia,\u201d but that highly subjective claim is increasingly difficult to reconcile with objective data.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China has been packing on 100 nuclear warheads a year since 2023, and now has at least 600 strategic-level warheads in its inventory. The New START agreement capped the U.S. and Russia at 800 apiece.
It is ludicrous for the Chinese to claim their arsenal is a mere trifle, or that the Chinese Communist regime \u2013 which is practicing naked territorial aggression in the South China Sea and is perpetually on the brink of invading peaceful Taiwan \u2013 is so inherently benevolent that its rapidly-growing nuclear weapons stockpile can be safely ignored.
The New START treaty was negotiated in 2010 by former U.S. and Russian leaders Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev. It formally expired on Thursday, although Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Russian participation in February 2023, in a fit of pique over American and European opposition to his invasion of Ukraine.
Putin claimed Russia was only suspending inspections and other verification activities, but would continue voluntarily observing the warhead caps, perhaps even for another year after New START formally expired. This was about as reassuring to U.S. policymakers as China claiming nobody should care about its 600 warheads because Beijing is so filled with love for peace.
Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergey Naryshkin claimed on Thursday that Moscow will \u201cact responsibly\u201d despite the expiration of the arms treaty.
\u201cRussia will continue to act responsibly and analyze this situation and the behavior, of course, of other countries, especially those countries that possess nuclear weapons,\u201d he said.
\u201cRussia sought to preserve this treaty, but at the same time took on the corresponding obligations to adhere to the treaty until its expiration date,\u201d he said, ignoring substantiated criticisms from the United States that Russia has long cheated on the agreement \u2013 and even tried to use SVR spies to manipulate American policymakers into making an even worse deal.
President Donald Trump has long pressed for China to join trilateral negotiations for a treaty to replace New START. He has slammed the expiring treaty as a \u201cbad deal\u201d that gave Russia \u201cthings that we never should have allowed,\u201d much as President Obama\u2019s nuclear deal with Iran gave too many concessions to that implacably hostile theocracy.
China\u2019s state-run Global Times on Thursday dumped all responsibility for creating a new arms treaty in America\u2019s lap, claiming Trump\u2019s reluctance to rush into a new deal with Russia \u201ccould ignite a new round of [the] nuclear arms race.\u201d
\u201cWhether a new nuclear arms control agreement can be reached now hinges largely on the US as Russia has shown relatively greater initiative, while the US said its strategic nuclear forces need modernization,\u201d the Global Times pontificated, before getting around to admitting that Russia\u2019s brutal war in Ukraine might complicate Moscow\u2019s claims of bring trustworthy and peaceful.<\/p>\n