Nuclear Bilateral Nuclear Arms Control: Possible Pathways to Progress

Amy F. Woolf is a Visiting Fellow at Perry World House and Consultant for Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Policy. The views expressed here are her own and do not reflect the views of current or former affiliations.

On January 21, 2021, just 24 hours after taking office, the Biden administration announced it would pursue a five-year extension of the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). The United States and Russia formalized this extension on February 3, 2021, two days before the treaty was due to expire. In June 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed that the United States and Russia would engage in “an integrated bilateral Strategic Stability Dialogue,” where they would “seek to lay the groundwork for future arms control and risk reduction measures.”

These prompt decisions seemed to reinvigorate a stalled U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control process. The Obama administration had suggested, in 2013, that the United States and Russia reduce their forces by one-third below New START levels; Russia rejected this proposal. The Trump administration suggested, in 2019, that New START should lapse and that the parties should replace it with an agreement that counted all types of Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons. Russia and China both rejected this formula.

By extending New START, the United States and Russia seemed to ensure that they would retain limits on their nuclear forces and sustain transparency into their capabilities while they pursued a follow-on treaty. In addition, the Biden administration advocated for a more expansive arms control process. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted that “[t]he United States will use the time provided by a five-year extension of the New START Treaty to pursue with the Russian Federation … arms control that addresses all of its nuclear weapons. We will also pursue arms control to reduce the dangers from China’s modern and growing nuclear arsenal.”

However, current challenges in the international security environment undermine prospects for continuing limits, never mind deeper reductions, in nuclear weapons. The United States and Russia probably will not resume negotiations on a replacement for New START until Russia ceases its aggression against Ukraine. China has not only rejected suggestions that it participate in bilateral arms control negotiations but has continued to expand its military capabilities in ways that might undermine stability and threaten U.S. allies and partners.

Some argue that these trends demonstrate that deeper nuclear reductions would be unwise at this time. Others, however, believe that current events, including Russia’s seeming threats of nuclear use during the war in Ukraine, warrant a renewed focus on transparency, confidence-building, and risk reduction measures that could reduce the risk of nuclear war.

Prospects for Arms Control with Russia

The United States and Russia are unlikely to reach an agreement on a formal treaty retaining current limits or imposing further reductions on their deployed nuclear forces before New START expires in 2026. Although the United States seems willing to move forward, it is not clear that arms control discussions will resume before the conflict in Ukraine ends. In June 2023, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, said that “rather than waiting to resolve all our bilateral differences, the United States is ready to engage Russia now to manage nuclear risks and develop a post-2026 arms control framework.” Russia, however, has rejected this approach. Sergey Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, has blamed the suspension of New START on “the totality of circumstances related to the destructive and hostile actions of the United States.” In response to Sullivan’s statement, he said that "there is simply no basis for a productive discussion here, but we are ready to patiently state our approaches and explain why the American course is destructive."

Even if the negotiations resume soon, the United States and Russia could find it difficult to resolve differences in their priorities in time to complete a new treaty before 2026. The United States has suggested that the next agreement “sustain limits … on the Russian systems covered under New START. . . limit the new kinds of nuclear systems Russia is developing; and . . . address all Russian nuclear weapons, including theater-range weapons.” Russia, in contrast, wants the arms control process to “cover the entire spectrum of offensive and defensive, nuclear and non-nuclear weapons with a strategic potential.” This list includes offensive nuclear and conventional strategic weapons, ballistic missile defenses, space strike capabilities, and the nuclear weapons of the United Kingdom and France.

The United States and Russia might, instead, establish broad goals for cooperation while identifying specific measures to help manage nuclear risks. For example, they could maintain predictability and transparency by pledging to keep their forces at the levels mandated in New START and to resume exchanging data on the numbers and locations of their deployed strategic weapons. They could also bolster crisis management measures and communications channels to reduce the risk of misunderstandings and misperceptions that could lead to inadvertent escalation.

Informal steps designed to demonstrate restraint, maintain transparency, and avoid miscalculations would likely be less comprehensive than those mandated by formal treaties. They would almost certainly lapse if either side sought additional forces to meet its national security requirements. Nevertheless, voluntary efforts at cooperation, new negotiations to reinvigorate existing communications channels, and consultations to identify new risk reduction measures could help the two sides forestall worst case assessments and resist arms race pressures until security conditions improved and formal negotiations resumed.

Prospects for Arms Control with China

U.S. officials have raised concerns about China’s growing nuclear arsenal and the potential that a regional crisis or conflict could escalate to nuclear war. In response, in November 2021, Biden invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to participate in a strategic stability dialogue that would establish “common-sense guardrails to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict and to keep lines of communication open.” According to the Biden White House, these talks would focus, at 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,” before eventually providing a venue for more formal arms control negotiations.

China has been reticent about joining strategic stability talks with the United States. It has not rejected all forms of arms control, participating in venues such as the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) negotiations and the P5 process with the United States, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom. It has advocated for the “five nuclear-weapon States … to further strengthen communication on strategic stability and conduct in-depth dialogue on reducing the role of nuclear weapons in their national security doctrines and on a broad range of issues, including missile defense, outer space, cyberspace, and artificial intelligence.”

But China explicitly rejected negotiations towards an agreement that would require transparency into or limits on its nuclear forces, citing the large disparity between the numbers of U.S., Russian, and Chinese nuclear warheads. According to Ambassador Fu Cong, director-general of the Department of Arms Control at China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “the countries with the largest nuclear arsenals should further conduct significant and substantive reduction in their nuclear arsenals in a verifiable, irreversible, and legally binding manner. This will create conditions for other nuclear-weapon States to join the nuclear disarmament process.” The ambassador also argued that transparency would undermine China’s strategic capability because China is “faced with a strategic competitor [with] 6000 nuclear warheads” who is also “developing missile defense, deploying all these missiles defense system around China, [and] talking about deploying the intermediate-range missiles around China.”

Even if China continues to expand its nuclear stockpile, which the U.S. government estimates could grow to around 1,500 warheads by 2035, it would not reach a level equal to that the United States and Russia. New START limits these two nations to 1,550 deployed warheads on long-range delivery systems, but these limits do not count all the warheads in U.S. and Russian stockpiles, which currently number around 3,700 and 4,000 warheads. Moreover, New START expires in 2026, after which the United States and Russia could expand their numbers of deployed forces, leading to far more than 1,550 deployed warheads on each side by the time China’s stockpile reaches 1,500 warheads. China, therefore, will almost certainly continue to reject proposals for negotiations on numerical limits on its nuclear weapons.

A strategic stability dialogue might, however, provide a pathway for engagement between the two countries. The key to progress depends on the issues included in the agenda and the incentives the United States provides to bring China to the table. For example, China may be more willing to participate if the agenda extends beyond nuclear weapons and focuses on other capabilities, like ballistic missile defenses and conventional strategic strike systems, that China believes would undermine its security. Even if the United States is unwilling to accept restraints on these weapons, it could offer insights into its plans for ballistic missile defenses in exchange for information about the planned size and scope of China’s nuclear modernization program. China might also be more willing to discuss the implications of its nuclear modernization program if the United States acknowledges that China’s nuclear deterrent poses a credible threat to the United States and places the two nations in “mutually vulnerable” deterrence relationship. As a matter of policy, the United States has long refused to acknowledge this reality, in part because it could undermine allies’ confidence in the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent, but the absence of an acknowledgment also serves to convince China that the United States is seeking “absolute security,” rather than mutual deterrence, with its nuclear weapons.

The two nations could also seek to identify and implement crisis management, communications, and risk reduction measures to address the risk that regional crises might escalate to nuclear war. For example, a missile launch notification agreement might reduce the risk that either nation misunderstands the purpose of a missile test flight, then responds with additional military action. Measures that restrain dangerous air operations or encounters at sea could also reduce the risk of inadvertent engagements and escalation during a crisis. China has been unwilling to engage in direct government-to-government discussions on these types of issues in the past, but, in the current security environment, this type of dialogue might serve as a starting point for a more fulsome arms control relationship.

Conclusion

Neither the United States and Russia, nor the United States and China, are likely to reverse the current pause in bilateral arms control until they believe they can strengthen their security by cooperating to manage nuclear risks. Moreover, they are unlikely to find an acceptable agenda for negotiations until each is willing to address the others’ concerns about threatening activities or capabilities. Even if they clear these two hurdles, they are unlikely to find success in talks that focus on nuclear reductions if each believes that it needs to modernize and possibly expand the size of its nuclear stockpile to achieve its security objectives.

A new process focused on transparency, communication, and risk reduction measures could provide a path forward, even if it did not lead to nuclear reductions. This approach would not be without complications. While the United States believes that steps to reduce the risk of nuclear war have value, China and Russia might believe that it is worth taking risks that might escalate to nuclear use if it helps convince the United States to disengage from a potential conflict. Nuclear weapons make this type of risk-taking strategy all the more dangerous. But the nations that now possess nuclear weapons see these weapons as essential to their security and will not eliminate them, or even continue to reduce them, until the security environment changes. Under these circumstances, an agenda that focuses on risk reduction, rather than weapons reductions, may not only serve as a temporary venue for negotiations, but may also create opportunities for the parties to address and resolve those security concerns that are blocking the path to further reductions.