China confirmed on Wednesday that they would be happy to join trilateral nuclear arms limitation talks with the US and Russia, but would only do so if the US drastically cut its nuclear stockpile to be in line with China’s.
The existing New START is set to expire, and the US has held up talks with Russia on extending it by demanding China also be included. China’s arsenal is so much smaller, however, that few see any obvious need, and view it as a US ploy to delay things.
The US and Russia each have around 6,000 nuclear warheads. China, by contrast, has only about 320. This makes China virtually immaterial in global arms limitations, nor could any mutual cuts make a dent in the US arsenal.
US officials have yet to say why they want China involved in the talks, but it’s clear they won’t agree to the cuts China is talking about.
The Chinese must have read Knapp’s article and are finally being a little proactive for once.
https://original.antiwar.com/thomas-knapp/2020/06/25/stop-blaming-russia-china-for-us-disarmament-failures/
That said, only 100 Hiroshima-sized nukes can end the world, and although modern nukes average 20x Hiroshima, the location of the blast determines the amount of soot kicked up to create nuclear winter.
China can end the world around 3 times over, assuming their entire arsenal survives a first strike.
Versus the 60 times for each of the big boys, which most assuredly cannot be meaningfully disarmed in a first strike however precise.
I’d like to see ALL nukes gone — but if the excuse was to keep some as a deterrent, a handful of warheads on a handful of “difficult to find and eliminate before a first strike” launch platforms like submarines would be sufficient. Having more than low double digit numbers of warheads isn’t deterrence, it’s just a very dangerous excuse for wasting lots of money.
The world does not need a single nuke. It needs Shanti, Shanti, Shanti. Or our small planet will become a wasteland.
The world does not need nukes; unfortunately we’d be into Russia already if not for nukes, and failing there, China… or both.
Modern conventional weapons make throwing bodies into battle as the Soviets did, impractical, peace after such wars on a large scale, a sick joke. The residues left behind, keep poisoing and killing; not radioactive but genotoxic all the same. The deliberate use of weapon after-effects is little different than spraying Agent Orange.
https://www.mediamonitors.net/us-and-israel-targeting-dna-in-gaza-the-dime-bomb-yet-another-genotoxic-weapon/
https://www.trwn.org/use-of-weapons/
A most reasonable position.
Without effective verification protocols, it’s meaningless.