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Proposals regarding international security should be considered in the context of global realities, Moscow has said, after China called for the world’s largest nuclear powers to negotiate a new treaty.
The Russian Foreign Ministry told business daily RBK that Moscow and Beijing treat each other’s initiatives with special attention and deep respect, adding that both nations were determined to further progress bilateral relations.
It said that China’s proposal needed to be considered in light of military and political realities, along with other factors concerning international security and strategic stability. It referred specifically to a deterioration in relations between the ‘Nuclear Five’ powers – Britain, France, the US, China and Russia.
Moscow said reducing confrontation between nuclear-armed states by eliminating “fundamental contradictions in the field of security” was an issue of “absolute priority.”
originally posted by: Boomer1947
a reply to: Ravenwatcher
Currently, Russia and the US are the only nations that have what's considered a nuclear war-fighting arsenal. That means the theoretical ability to strike the other side first, fast, and accurately enough to take out the other side's nuclear arsenal without killing a lot of their population. That would theoretically allow the side that struck first to be in a position where they could hold the other side's population hostage to nuclear blackmail. This standoff evolved during the peak of the Cold War when each side had somewhere around 25,000 to 30,000 nuclear warheads. After the fall of the Soviet Union, both sides wanted to reduce the size of their arsenals both to save money and to minimize the damage in case the standoff failed and bombs started flying. At the same time, both sides realized that the other side would never voluntarily agree to an inferior strategic position, so we have worked our way down to the point where each side has about 1,700 nuclear warheads on active status, capable of a theoretical first strike. Both sides have a total of somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 warheads, each, including those for tactical and battlefield use.
Most of the other nuclear powers (UK, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea) have less than 300 warheads, each. That kind of arsenal is capable of nuclear blackmail against a country that doesn't have any nuclear weapons, and provides a deterrent from attack by another country that does have nuclear weapons. That's why, when China got the bomb, their next door neighbor India also decided they had to get the bomb, so they wouldn't be subject to blackmail. Once India got the bomb, Pakistan had to get the bomb, for the same reason. Once Israel got the bomb, Iran decided they wanted to get the bomb, so as not to be blackmailed by Israel. And so on.
The US realized this would be the case, back in the Eisenhower Administration. That's why we negotiated treaties with NATO, Japan, Australia, and South Korea to put them under our nuclear umbrella--so they wouldn't all go out and develop their own nuclear weapons. If we pull out of NATO, for example, Poland, Germany, and maybe other countries like Sweden and Turkey would start thinking about developing their own bombs. That's called nuclear proliferation and it's dangerous because it multiplies the different players who could start a nuclear war and the number of warheads that could get in the hands of terrorist organizations.
China has a bit less than 500 warheads. That's enough to deter any potential adversary in their neighborhood, but it's not enough to get in to a nuclear war-fighting posture with the US or Russia. In other words, we can theoretically exercise nuclear blackmail against China, if we got in a dust-up over Taiwan but they can't deter us the way Russia could. Theoretically, we could use tactical nuclear weapons against Chinese forces in a war in the South China Sea, but they couldn't make a credible counter threat against US territories and bases, without risking a nuclear exchange which they couldn't win.
My view is that they really don't want to try to take Taiwan until they have the ability to keep the US out of the fight, and they can't keep the US out unless and until they have a nuclear war-fighting capability equivalent to the US and/or Russia. A few years ago, China suddenly announced that they were going to start building more missiles and warheads, and missile silos under construction suddenly started showing up in spy satellite images. I interpreted that as a plan to prepare for confrontation with the US over Taiwan.
Since that time, there has been a big scandal in China where many of the ICBMs in their silos have been found to be filled with water instead of rocket fuel. Maybe they have decided they can't build enough ICBMs fast enough to keep the US out of the fight over Taiwan anytime in the near future, and have decided to try to achieve their objective with arms limitation treaties instead.
What I also find interesting here, is that they are trying to get Russia involved in this deal, as well. They obviously want to end up in a situation where China, Russia, and the US end up as roughly co-equal at the top of the nuclear arms totem pole, and everyone else is down at the bottom. Over the last decade or so, Russia has been claiming to develop all these terror weapons, like autonomous nuclear powered torpedos and cruise missiles and now, EMP satellites. The interesting thing about those systems, is that they are all designed to be used only after Russia has already lost a nuclear war. They have no utility in actually fighting a nuclear war. Why are they investing in systems that would only be used after they are already dead? It's almost as if Russia has secretly come to the conclusion that they would lose in a nuclear exchange with the US and their relative position is only going to get worse because our economy is 10 times the size of theirs and they can't keep up in an arms race.
I don't think China and Russia would be floating these ideas if they were confident in their ability to compete with the US.
The entire Chinese MO is "Those fools in the west with their Judeo-Christian ethics will believe us every time we lie to them."