A bilateral NFU with China would prevent escalation, increase nuclear deterrence, and lead to international follow-on.

The NPR placed no emphasis on entering a ‘strategic dialogue’ with China, which we consider essential to enhancing nuclear stability in the vital and precarious Pacific region. Such a dialogue might be initiated by an offer to China to enter into a bilateral NFU agreement with three conditions. Firstly, the Chinese would acknowledge that such an agreement would cover US allies; logically, this should not give China cause to object, because it already pledges NFU globally. Secondly, the Chinese would agree to enter into a process to foster transparency and to build confidence in support of an NFU agreement, and nuclear stability more generally. Thirdly, China would agree to work with the United States to strengthen nuclear stewardship globally, which might include constraining Russian and North Korean nuclear belligerence – actions which are in China’s interest.

Compatible with a bilateral NFU pledge would be a mutual understanding that both sides are already highly vulnerable to the nuclear weapons of the other side. Thus far, the United States has resisted such an understanding. This would be an important element of any dialogue and could serve to limit China’s desire for a massive build-up.

Such talks should engender improved understanding of the dynamics of crisis and escalation instability, and thus reinforce the need to decouple nuclear weapons from such risks. Confidence-building measures should include crisis-management protocols, effective and tested hotlines for incident management, and talks aimed at gaining a clearer and ultimately converging understanding of why each power has the nuclear forces it does. In due course, other nuclear confidence-building measures worth considering could include agreement not to interfere with each other’s early-warning and nuclear command-and-control mechanisms, both of which could be highly destabilising; pre-launch warnings and shared early-warning agreements similar to those being negotiated with the Russians at the end of the Clinton administration; transparency measures to alert each side to future nuclear-modernisation efforts and to provide explanations for them; and mutual on-site inspections where helpful.

Towards the end of this strategic dialogue augmented by confidence-building measures, mutual limits might be agreed on deployed warheads held by the US and China. Such a goal would flow logically from greater strategic understanding, as it did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. If China comes to understand that its minimal deterrent posture can be achieved, perhaps at a higher level, but without achieving parity with the US, then progress in achieving agreements similar to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty might be made. But given Russia’s aggressive nuclear doctrine, trilateral strategic arms-control limitations seem implausible and unwise. The United States will need to achieve one deterrence arrangement with an aggressive Russia that is used to nuclear parity, and another with a China that may still be searching for a new form of minimal deterrence.

The concept of nuclear stewardship should extend to joint efforts to lessen nuclear instability across the region. To this end, the two superpowers should affirm their commitment to denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula. Meanwhile, the United States must bolster nuclear deterrence there, while keeping China abreast of its intentions as part of the process of confidence-building.