Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 and Part 2 first)
Nickolas Roth said, “I would hope that the Biden administration is choosing to engage with China on non-proliferation issues.” The U.S. embassy in Beijing has received questions about whether the new Biden administration was talking to China about the halt to its plutonium reporting, but such questions were not answered by the embassy.
These questions are becoming critically important according to Frank von Hippel because of the rising tensions between the U.S. and China. The island nation of Taiwan is a potential flashpoint between the two countries. There are even suggestions that the U.S. and China have entered into a Cold War 2.0. It is unknown whether China is interested in discussing these matters with the U.S. and/or its neighbors.
Robert Wood is the U.S. ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations Conference on Disarmament. On Tuesday, he accused China of being unwilling “to engage meaningfully” with the Biden administration on nuclear weapons talks. Wood told a U.N. conference that “Despite China’s dramatic build-up of its nuclear arsenal, it continues to resist discussing nuclear risk reduction bilaterally with the United States – a dialogue we have with Russia.” China’s representative to the U.N. pushed back on that claim. He said told the same conference that China is “ready to carry out positive dialogue and exchange with all parties.”
The increasing acrimony that characterized U.S.-China relations under the administration of President Trump certainly did not instill a lot of confidence with respect to engagement on nuclear security issues according to von Hippel.
Gregory Kulacki is a senior analyst on nuclear policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists who is now based in Japan. He said that the previous good level of engagement that had developed between the U.S. and China on nuclear policy prior to the year 2000 is just a distant memory now. He blames the U.S. for the current silence from China.
Kulacki said, “The [George W] Bush Jr administration’s decision [in 2002] to withdraw from the ABM [1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile] treaty pretty much gutted any real interest in China in pursuing arms control talks of any substance with the United States.”
The Bush administration had a strong commitment to the deployment of missile defense systems in order to protect the U.S. from “growing missile threats” at the time from a nuclear-armed and belligerent North Korea. China interpreted those U.S. actions as an attempt to counterbalance China’s own military capabilities in its own neighborhood.
According to von Hippel and his co-authors, the U.S. should work with Japan, South Korea and China to declare a “commercial plutonium timeout.” The U.S. could offer to delay the development of U.S. breeder reactors and commercial plutonium production programs if China would do the same. If all of these countries could increase the amount of transparency with resect to their uranium and plutonium stockpiles and related activities, it could serve to boost confidence for all parties to scale back those programs. The problem is deciding who will be willing to take the first necessary steps.