U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Christopher Yeaw told the U.N.-backed Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday that China is racing to expand its nuclear arsenal and has conducted secret low-yield nuclear bomb tests to improve its weapons.
“Despite its claims to the contrary, China has deliberately and without constraint, massively expanded its nuclear arsenal without transparency or any indication of China’s intent or end point,” Yeaw told the conference.
Yeaw produced additional declassified data to support the U.S. contention that China conducted a secret low-yield nuclear weapons test at its Lop Nur facility near Kazakhstan on June 22, 2020. China ostensibly declared a moratorium on nuclear testing in 1996, but U.S. intelligence believes Beijing has violated that self-imposed restriction on multiple occasions.
The June 2020 test became headline news when sources inside the U.S. intelligence community leaked data on the covert Chinese bomb test to the media, along with an assessment that the Lop Nur detonation – relatively small by modern nuclear warhead standards, but powerful enough to cause seismic tremors in Kazakhstan – was part of China’s effort to modernize its nuclear arsenal.
Yeaw on Monday revealed that “the estimated yield of the event was a 10-tonne nuclear explosion, or five tonnes conventional equivalent, which assumes the explosion was fully coupled in hard rock below the water table.”
Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Thomas DiNanno, who revealed in early February that the United States was aware of the Lop Nur test, gave a statement to the Conference on Disarmament that accused the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China of using sophisticated techniques to keep the world from knowing that it was cheating on international verification protocols.
“The PLA sought to conceal testing by obfuscating the nuclear explosions because it recognized these tests violate test ban commitments. China has used decoupling – a method to decrease the effectiveness of seismic monitoring – to hide their activities from the world,” DiNanno said.
Yeaw and DiNanno said the PLA succeeded in concealing the June 2020 detonation from the office that monitors compliance with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
China has not ratified the CTBT, which was formulated in 1996, and neither has the United States, but the treaty office makes an effort to keep tabs on all nuclear weapons detonations and there have been very few of them since the CTBT was written.
The flurry of activity at Lop Nur drew international attention as far back as 2020, but the latest revelations by the United States include the first hard evidence that a weapons test occurred. U.S. officials are calling attention to the Lop Nur event as part of the Trump administration’s argument that the expired New START treaty between the United States and Russia should be succeeded by a trilateral agreement that includes China.
DiNanno noted that “almost all of the U.S. deployed nuclear forces were subject to New START, while only a fraction of Russia’s much larger stockpile was,” and “zero Chinese nuclear weapons” were covered.
“China’s entire nuclear arsenal has no limits, no transparency, no declarations, and no controls,” he said.
Yeaw agreed that the “greatest flaw” of New START was that it “did not account for the unprecedented, deliberate, rapid and opaque nuclear weapons buildup by China.”
Yeaw added that, contrary to China’s frequent claims to desire only a tiny nuclear arsenal to provide a bare minimum of deterrence against other nuclear powers, the Chinese “may achieve parity” with America and Russia “within the next four or five years.”
Yeaw has already met with Russian representatives in Geneva and was scheduled for talks with Chinese delegates on Tuesday. He noted that China continues to make international monitoring of its nuclear tests “difficult” – for example, by refusing to allow the sort of internationally-monitored seismic testing near Lop Nur that America permits near its nuclear test site in Nevada.
China remained intransigent on Monday, stubbornly insisting that it has conducted no nuclear tests despite the evidence presented by the United States.
“The U.S. accusation that China conducted a nuclear explosion test is completely unfounded and is merely a pretext for resuming its own nuclear testing,” insisted Chinese Ambassador Jian Shen.
“The U.S.’s practice of smearing other countries to evade international arms control obligations seriously damages its own international standing,” Jian sniffed.
President Donald Trump said in October that American nuclear testing could resume for the first time since 1992, in part because of China’s nuclearization efforts and Russia’s test of a nuclear-powered cruise missile.
“Because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” Trump said in October after meeting with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
“With others doing testing, I think it’s appropriate that we do also,” the president later told reporters aboard Air Force One.
Yeaw and DiNanno seemed to be testing the waters at the Conference on Disarmament for a compromise in which the U.S. would step back from nuclear testing if a new arms control treaty that includes both China and Russia was crafted.
DiNanno said as much in the statement he made to the Conference on Disarmament two weeks ago, when he first disclosed U.S. intelligence on China’s nuclear testing.
“Together, we can prevent an unmitigated nuclear arms race, limit the build-up of nuclear arms, restore responsible behavior when it comes to nuclear testing, and, as appropriate, address issues concerning non-NPT nuclear weapons possessing states,” he told the Conference.
DiNanno said one of the most important questions to be answered by the conference was “how much deterrence is enough” – and he said the answer “will depend, in part, on the success of upcoming multilateral strategic stability discussions.”
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