The starting goal, they insist, is to simply avoid miscommunication and accidental war - even if it never rises to the level of a nuclear threat. In interviews, Biden’s aides have said the effort is a tentative first step toward a far larger agenda, akin to the initial conversations about nuclear weapons that Russia and the United States held in the 1950s. president raised what the White House has euphemistically called “strategic stability talks.” In Biden's virtual summit meeting this month with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who clearly has sought to present himself as a epoch-defining leader alongside Mao, the U.S. In some ways, Washington is focused on the progress of China’s nuclear capability in a way that it has not been since Mao Zedong first tested a weapon in 1964. China’s capabilities could also pose a threat to Biden’s hopes of reducing the role of nuclear weapons in American defenses. The fear is that an attack that blinded space satellites or command-and-control systems could quickly escalate, in ways that were not imaginable in the nuclear competitions of the Cold War. Biden’s aides are driven by concern that a new arms race is heating up over hypersonic weapons, space arms and cyberweapons, all of which could unleash a costly and destabilizing spiral of move and countermove. In Washington, the issue has taken on more urgency than officials are acknowledging publicly, according to officials who are involved. officials, describing the American strategy, say Biden and his top aides plan to move slowly - focusing the talks first on avoiding accidental conflict, then on each nation’s nuclear strategy and the related instability that could come from attacks in cyberspace and outer space.įinally - maybe years from now - the two nations could begin discussing arms control, perhaps a treaty or something politically less complex, such as an agreement on common norms of behavior. President Joe Biden is seeking to change all that.įor the first time, the United States is trying to nudge China’s leadership into a conversation about its nuclear capability. satellites in time of conflict.Īnd Chinese officials have consistently rejected the idea of entering arms control talks, shutting down such suggestions by noting - accurately - that the United States and Russia each have deployed five times more nuclear warheads than Beijing possesses. The two countries have never had an in-depth conversation about American missile defenses in the Pacific, or China’s experiments to blind U.S. The United States has no nuclear hotline to Beijing. President Biden raised the possibility of “strategic stability talks” with Xi Jinping. President Joe Biden meets virtually with Xi Jinping, the president of China, during a virtual summit at the White House in Washington, Nov.
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