US President Donald Trump is meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing with the global and bilateral arms control architecture collapsing. The Eleventh Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, now taking place in New York, is sliding towards a third consecutive failure to produce a consensus document.
new BEGINNING expired on February 5, leaving the US and Russia without binding limits on their strategic arsenal for the first time since the 1970s. The global arms control system is on life support in a time of unprecedented global nuclear risks.
Every permanent member of the Security Council (P5) is now expanding their nuclear capabilities. Artificial intelligence is entering the targeting, surveillance and decision support systems surrounding nuclear forces, compressing the time leaders have to think before they act.
And yet the moment is not as bleak as it seems, provided the focus shifts from global initiatives to bilateral nuclear agreements. An understanding between China and the US – even a modest one – would deliver more nuclear stability this decade than the multilateral process at the UN has produced in 15 years.
Strategic stability in the Cold War between the US and Russia rested on a logic where two roughly symmetrical arsenals, mutual assured destruction, and verification regimes gave each side confidence in the other’s stance. None of these terms describes the current Sino-American nuclear relationship.
China’s arsenal is the third largest and growing, but remains well below the US and Russian totals. Verification of Chinese forces does not exist in any binding form. And today’s most destabilizing developments, notably long-range conventional precision strike, AI-enabled wide-area surveillance, and hypersonic systems that blur the line between conventional and nuclear payloads, are not included in contemporary arms control initiatives.
What a new Sino-American understanding of strategic stability looks like in practice is the question this week’s summit can begin to answer.
Beijing’s Arms Control Record
Against this background, China’s contribution to nuclear restraint deserves more recognition than Western capitals usually give it. For six decades, Beijing has been the only member of the P5 guard a doctrinal commitment with no first use. This commitment has been repeatedly questioned by Western analysts, but, as a matter of declarative policy, it has been maintained to this day.
China’s firm offer to negotiate a no-first-use mutual commitment among the P5, presented in the working papers in successive NPT preparatory committees, it is not merely rhetorical. It may be the single most concrete proposal on the table for reducing the risk of nuclear use among major powers.
The objection that doctrine and operational reality can change in principle is an objection, but it risks moving the goalposts. Public doctrine is the foundation of any country’s nuclear policy, and a no-first-use P5 understanding would constrain Washington and Moscow in ways that their current positions do not.
Beijing has also been consistent in arguing that strategic stability cannot be discussed separately from conventional weapons. Conventional long-range precision weapons can now destroy hardened targets that previously only nuclear weapons could reliably destroy.
From Beijing’s perspective—and increasingly from the perspective of Russian and Western technical analysts—a sufficiently capable conventional first strike against silo fields and mobile launchers, followed by interception of the missile defenses of any surviving retaliatory force, could in principle leave the target state without effective retaliation. Whether such a scenario is operationally realistic has been debated.
However, it is taken seriously in Chinese planning. This is, in a sense, the engine of the current security dilemma between the US and China. American observers see new Chinese silo construction in three large desert areas, expanding submarine patrols and new warhead-related infrastructure.
China watchers see the US’s long-range conventional attack, enhanced missile defenses and China’s designation as a major strategic competitor, and conclude that Washington is preparing the same. Each side reads the other through its own worst lens; this is inherently dangerous, as this security dilemma is easier to fall into than out of.
Vital summit
A meaningful US-China conversation on strategic stability can begin without a treaty. It calls for confidence-building steps that can be agreed at the political level in Beijing. A pre-launch missile notification regime, of the kind Washington and Moscow maintained for decades even at the height of the Cold War, is the most obvious place to start.
A robust channel of crisis communication—beyond the existing military line that has been sparingly used—would be second. A mutual understanding not to interfere with the other side’s nuclear command and control infrastructure, even by non-nuclear means, would address the most likely cause of unintended escalation in a regional crisis.
None of this requires either side to accept numerical ceilings, nor wait for progress at the UN in New York. These tangible efforts would reduce the risk that peacetime competition could escalate into war through simple misperception.
Furthermore, a reciprocal framework for regional-range nuclear forces would be the most important next step. Clarity on short-range Chinese nuclear forces, in exchange for clarity on America’s forward-deployed nuclear posture in the Asia-Pacific, would address both sides’ sharper first-use anxieties without reducing either country’s overall arsenal.
After all, this week’s conversation doesn’t need to produce a shared commitment to be vital. A frank discussion of what it would take for each side to make both promises credible would mark the beginning of a bilateral dialogue that has been absent for 50 years. Such talks took place at the height of the Cold War. The door is open in Beijing this week.
Dan Plesch is Professor of Diplomacy and Strategy at SOAS University of London. He is the founder of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) in Washington, DC, a former senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI) in London, and a ‘door tenant’ at the law chambers of 9 Bedford Row.
Manuel Galileo is a chartered civil engineer and a foreign affairs, AI, public policy and military analyst. He is an Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Research Fellow at SOAS University of London.
