America's nuclear meltdown towards 'global zero'.

• Author: Lee, Lavina
• Position: The World Today - Essay

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CHINA'S 2008 "White Paper on National Defense--still the most definitive statement of Beijing's strategic doctrine--asserts that "all nuclear-weapon slates should make an unequivocal commitment to the thorough destruction of nuclear weapons." Consistent with this statement, China already has responded favorably to the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) agreement between the U.S. and Russia. Although this response should be encouraging to the Obama Administration, New START likely is to be viewed in Beijing as merely a first, tentative step toward global zero, rather than a dramatic signal that alters Chinese strategic calculations and threat perceptions regarding America. In China's view, the U.S. and Russia, as "the two countries possessing the largest nuclear arsenals, bear special and primary responsibility for nuclear disarmament" and should "further drastically reduce their nuclear arsenals in a verifiable and irreversible manner, so as to create the necessary conditions for the participation of other nuclear-weapon states in the process of nuclear disarmament."

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Although New START commits the U.S. and Russia to significant reductions in deployed strategic warheads, limiting them to no more than 1,550 each, it places no limits on either state's nondeployed nuclear warheads. Given that the U.S. currently has 5,113 warheads in its nuclear stockpile (not including "several thousand" warheads that are retie5 and awaiting dismantlement), and China's nuclear capabilities are estimated at around 240 nuclear warheads, it is unlikely that the Chinese will believe that New START has created anywhere near the "necessary conditions" to enable China to begin force reductions of its own. The Chinese have not placed a precise number on the level of force reductions they expect of the U.S. and Russia, but it almost is certain that some semblance of nuclear parity with Beijing will be required.

In any case, given Pres. Barack Obama's own admission that global zero is unlikely to be achieved in his lifetime, the Chinese have cause to question whether the U.S. and Russia voluntarily will relinquish their nuclear superiority any time soon. Under these circumstances, America will be waiting a long time for any Chinese reciprocity on nuclear force reductions. At a minimum, Beijing's posture will stiffen domestic opposition in the U.S. to further cuts in America's own arsenal.

At the April 2010 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C., Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India welcomed New START as a "step in the right direction" toward global zero and stated that he was "encouraged" by the "U.S. Nuclear Posture Review" (NPR). That position is consistent with the stance of successive Indian governments of various political persuasions that have advocated global nuclear disarmament since India gained independence. The present Congress Party-led government has called for negotiations on a multilateral, "nondiscriminatory" and "verifiable" Nuclear Weapons Convention that would ban the "development, production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons" in a "time-bound" manner.

India's development of an indigenous nuclear capacity, despite New Delhi's strong stance on nuclear disarmament, would appear at first glance to undermine the credibility of its stance on global zero. However, Indian leaders have maintained that the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1995, despite the failure of the nuclear weapons states to take concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament in a time-bound manner, left New Delhi no choice but to seek a nuclear deterrent to protect its "autonomy of decisionmaking" (i.e., as a defense against nuclear blackmail). In light of its own experience, India's response to the Obama Administration's global zero agenda has emphasized the connection between comprehensive nuclear...