China-US power competition brings a Cold War arms concept back into fashion

Name: The top secret mine that fuelled China’s nuclear program
Uploaded: 2020-12-03T04:00:14.000Z
Duration: 1 min 52 s
Description: The top secret mine that fuelled China’s nuclear program

Military and foreign policy specialists at Xiangshan forum in Beijing discuss need for arms control structures to be repaired after Trump era, and updated

But China is reluctant to join US-Russian nuclear negotiations without Washington and Moscow reducing their larger stockpiles

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Nuclear missiles are paraded in Beijing during celebrations marking 2019’s 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Photo: Xinhua

Catherine Wong

Published: 12:00pm, 3 Dec 2020Updated: 12:00pm, 3 Dec 2020

Military tensions between China and the United States have led to calls for a new “strategic stability” and new arms control regimes covering nuclear weapons, cyberspace and artificial intelligence.

As dozens of Chinese and international military and foreign policy specialists gathered for this year’s Xiangshan forum, conducted by video conference, the biggest question looming was: “As the world’s two biggest powers descend into a new cold war, how can China and the US restore trust and stabilise relations under a new US administration?”

During the two-day regional security forum in Beijing, which ended on Wednesday, it was argued that the arms control structure put in place at the end of the Cold War between Russia and the US was “crumbling” following the Donald Trump administration’s withdrawal from a major arms control agreement, and was outdated.

“It is widely accepted [that] the arms control architecture developed at the end of the Cold War is inadequate in today’s multipolar world,” Evgeny Buzhinskiy, a former director of the international treaties department of Russia’s defence ministry, said during the forum on Tuesday.

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The top secret mine that fuelled China’s nuclear program

Another major concern was that Beijing – which has been fast narrowing the gap in its military technologies with Washington and has in recent years replaced Russia as America’s biggest strategic competitor – represented a threat without any limits imposed by treaty on its nuclear development.

With the US-Russia 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) ending next February pending an extension, the Trump administration has insisted on including China in future nuclear negotiations.

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