Narrowing the U.S.-China Gap on Missile Defense: How to Forestall a Nuclear Arms Race
Tong Zhao | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The ongoing dispute over the impact of U.S. missile defense on China presents a major and growing challenge to the U.S.-China security relationship. If Beijing’s concerns are left unaddressed, they will likely fuel more intensive Chinese efforts to modernize its nuclear forces and other strategic capabilities. Amid rising great power competition, this dispute and its consequences could severely undermine bilateral strategic stability. Finger pointing has done no good, as the perception gap between the two countries over the motivations behind U.S. missile defense is genuine and deeply rooted.
Figuring It Out the Hard Way: America, France, and the Challenges of Allied Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons, 1958-63
Timothy P. McDonnell | Nonproliferation Review
The US nuclear-policy community did not always accept today’s conventional wisdom that a state’s first nuclear test is a critical milestone; that even a small, rudimentary nuclear arsenal is a major concern; and that preventing states, even allies, from acquiring nuclear weapons should be a core US foreign-policy goal. Between 1958 and 1963, Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy experimented with three different responses to the French nuclear-weapons program: (1) offering to share US-owned nuclear weapons liberally; (2) leaving France to pursue nuclear weapons unaided; and (3) offering to sell France advanced submarines and missiles. Each of these approaches was the product of evolving beliefs about when a state “went nuclear,” the potency of small arsenals, and whether the proliferation of nuclear weapons among allies undermined or advanced US interests.
A New Superpower Competition Between Beijing and Washington: China's Nuclear Buildup
David Sanger and William J. Broad | New York Times
When negotiators from the United States and Russia met in Vienna last week to discuss renewing the last major nuclear arms control treaty that still exists between the two countries, American officials surprised their counterparts with a classified briefing on new and threatening nuclear capabilities — not Russia’s, but China’s. Marshall Billingslea, Mr. Trump’s new arms control negotiator, opened his classified briefing, officials said, by describing the Chinese program as a “crash nuclear buildup,” a “highly alarming effort” to gain parity with the far larger arsenals that Russia and the United States have kept for decades. The American message was clear: Mr. Trump will not renew any major arms control treaty that China does not also join — dangling the possibility that Mr. Trump would abandon New START altogether if he did not get his way.
Russia's Priority is to Involve UK, France in Future Nuclear Arms Control Talks - Diplomat
TASS
Russia thinks it necessary that the United Kingdom and France join the strategic nuclear arms control process as the United States’ closest NATO allies, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in an interview with TASS First Deputy Director General Mikhail Gusman on Friday. “As an essential element of our position on the future of nuclear arms control we insist that the United States’ closest NATO allies possessing nuclear weapons should join these hypothetical talks. They are France and the United Kingdom,” he said. “We make no secret that this is our priority. As far as the United States is focusing on the necessity to go beyond the frame of the traditional Russian-US dialogue in this sphere [insisting that China join it — TASS] and make it multilateral, our priority is to have the above mentioned states join this process.”
North Korea Says It Will Counter ‘Nuclear With Nuclear’ Over ‘Hostile’ US Policy
Brie Stimson | Fox News
North Korea Thursday said it has no choice but to “counter nuclear with nuclear” over the “hostile policy” of the United States, which it blames for failed bilateral talks. “In order to eliminate the nuclear threats from the U.S., the DPRK government made all possible efforts either through dialogue or in resort to the international law, but all ended in vain,” North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Institute for Disarmament and Peace said in a report, according to NK News, a U.S. website based in South Korea. “The option left was only one, and that was to counter nuclear with nuclear.” The government announced plans to build up its weapons arsenal “to contain the persistent nuclear threats from the U.S.," according to NK News.
Top Diplomats From US and Iran at UN on Iran Nuclear Deal
Edith M. Lederer and Matthew Lee | AP
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif are scheduled to address a U.N. Security Council meeting Tuesday on the implementation of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — the accord that the Trump administration pulled out of more than two years ago. A key issue at Tuesday's virtual Security Council meeting is expected to be a provision in the resolution endorsing the nuclear deal that calls for the termination of the U.N. arms embargo against Iran in mid-October. The Trump administration is vehemently opposed to lifting the arms embargo.