The 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 “regrettable,” because the treaty was “vital 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.”
Lin said that China nevertheless has no intention of joining negotiations for a new treaty because Beijing’s “defensive nuclear strategy” and “policy of ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons” supposedly immunize it from needing to join any arms treaty, even though China has one of the fastest-growing nuclear arsenals in the world.
“Russia 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’s proposal, work out a responsible solution to the treaty’s expiration, and resume strategic stability dialogue with Russia at an early date,” he said.
China has insisted its nuclear arsenal is on a “totally different scale as those of the United States and Russia,” 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 – which is practicing naked territorial aggression in the South China Sea and is perpetually on the brink of invading peaceful Taiwan – 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 “act responsibly” despite the expiration of the arms treaty.
“Russia will continue to act responsibly and analyze this situation and the behavior, of course, of other countries, especially those countries that possess nuclear weapons,” he said.
“Russia sought to preserve this treaty, but at the same time took on the corresponding obligations to adhere to the treaty until its expiration date,” he said, ignoring substantiated criticisms from the United States that Russia has long cheated on the agreement – 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 “bad deal” that gave Russia “things that we never should have allowed,” much as President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran gave too many concessions to that implacably hostile theocracy.
China’s state-run Global Times on Thursday dumped all responsibility for creating a new arms treaty in America’s lap, claiming Trump’s reluctance to rush into a new deal with Russia “could ignite a new round of [the] nuclear arms race.”
“Whether 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,” the Global Times pontificated, before getting around to admitting that Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine might complicate Moscow’s claims of bring trustworthy and peaceful.
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