China’s Nuclear Weapons Explosion: Will They Sign Disarmament Treaties?

By Peter Huessy, President, Geostrategic Analysis, Senior Fellow, The Hudson Institute

(Washington DC) Dr. Richard Garwin and Professor Frank N. von Hippel in “How to Avoid a Nuclear War with China,” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 13, 2023) believe the US community of military hawks has unnecessarily transformed China from a benign, “peaceful rise” strategic partner to a competitor, even an “adversary” of the United States, thus putting a kibosh on nuclear arms reductions.

“How to Avoid a Nuclear War with China” 

In their view, US hawks are guilty of: (1) Using “worst case” projections of future Chinese nuclear force deployments; (2) building threatening US missile defense programs; (3) making implicit US nuclear threats over a possible “confrontation” with China about Taiwan; and (4) planning a US “pre-emptively attack” on China’s vulnerable nuclear deterrent.

If the US got rid of this aggressive behavior toward China, von Hippel and Garwin argue, the US would avoid the previous historical mistake of describing our adversaries such as the USSR as an “evil empire,” a demonization they claim almost pushed the Soviet leadership into war with the United States during the Reagan administration.

Nuclear Freeze

However, to make the case that a benign and friendly US attitude toward China would do the arms control trick, von Hippel and Garwin invent a history of the end of the Cold War with the USSR that is totally at odds with the facts. They claim the [Soviet proposed] nuclear freeze movement transformed the US-USSR relationship, limited arms racing and brought about the START arms reduction process.

While such a romantic notion might be popular in some circles, the Reagan administration and Congress explicitly rejected the nuclear freeze, and instead fully modernized America’s nuclear force. Reagan proposed reductions long before the freeze emerged as a Soviet strategy to bring US nuclear modernization to a standstill.

Contrary to the freeze idea, the Reagan START process of dramatic nuclear reductions coupled with a simultaneous modernization of our nuclear deterrent, known informally as a “build-down” approach, was proposed by President Reagan in November 1981 at the National Press Club. The proposed reductions strategy, based on a series of National Security Defense Directives, created by the White House National Security Council and Department of Defense staff, sharply changed the previous strategy of building-up both US and Soviet nuclear forces allowed by the 1972 and 1979 SALT arms agreements. Sven Kraemer’s important book “Inside the Cold War” on the Reagan administration’s nuclear strategy details this effort as does Lee Edward’s work at the Heritage Foundation.

Most importantly, at the time, the disarmament and freeze crowd ridiculed Reagan’s notion that dramatic nuclear reductions could be achieved. Not only that, but if the nuclear freeze had gone into effect in 1991, for example, it would have frozen Soviet long-range strategic warheads at as high a level as thirteen thousand, according to then Senator Dan Coats (R-Indiana) during debate on the START I treaty.