By Henry Sokolski
With the current crisis in Ukraine, it’s tempting to view Chinese compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) as an academic indulgence. Giving in to this inclination, however, would be wrong.
As dangerous as Russia currently is, China will be more threatening in the long run. As we are learning with Russia’s violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, binding understandings must be enforced lest their violators run roughshod over law and good order. This is true with Russia’s behavior in Ukraine. It is no less so with China’s nuclear weapons buildup and its repeated refusal to enter into good faith negotiations to limit its nuclear weapons arsenal as required by Article VI of the NPT.
This buildup and diplomatic refusal clearly fly in the face of Beijing’s legal obligations under the treaty. The question is what might bring Beijing back into compliance. To get the answers, the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, where I am the executive director, held a battery of workshops last fall, followed by a week-long diplomatic simulation. The participants included U.S., Japanese, and Australian former and current officials and staff as well as outside experts. The group concluded that Beijing is unlikely to comply willingly with the NPT anytime soon, but that U.S. and international security would still be best served by spotlighting Beijing’s nuclear adventurism and suggesting diplomatic off-ramps to arrest its nuclear buildup.
In specific, the group recommended that Washington raise concerns about China’s noncompliance with Article VI in international forums, that it share sensitive intelligence on China’s nuclear weapons activities, and that it work with allies and key nonaligned states to promote new, practical steps to restrain nuclear competition.
The steps included creating nuclear hotlines between all five of the recognized NPT states (United States, Russia, China, the UK, and France), using the P-5 forum to further clarify precisely what a nuclear test is, and calling on China to resume its adherence to its voluntary agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to report annually on its “peaceful” production and use of plutonium. They also included taking a time-out in the commercial deployment of plutonium-fueled reactors (or, at least, submitting them all to IAEA inspections) and opening talks to cap the numbers of deployed nuclear weapons systems.
The group also recommended that the United States leverage Beijing away from nuclear adventurism militarily. This should be done, however, not by mounting a quantitative nuclear weapons buildup of our own, but by doing more to make America’s nuclear weapons less vulnerable to attack and by accelerating U.S. and allied advanced conventional and new generation warfare capabilities.
–—Henry Sokolski is the executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and author of Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future (2d ed., 2019). He served as deputy for nonproliferation policy in the office of the U.S. secretary of defense from 1989 to 1993.