Robert A. Wood, the the U.S. Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament, a U.S. Commissioner for the New START Treaty’s Bilateral Consultative Commission, and a member of Marshall Billingslea’s team for the arms control talks at the June 22 meeting in Vienna with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergie Ryabkov and the Russian team, somehow expects that China will be at the table, too, even though the Chinese are still saying they have no interest in being there. Worse, Wood conveyed the impression, in an interview with CBS published on June 19, that the U.S. side fully expects to control the agenda and whatever it is that the US expects Russia and China to agree to, without offering an concessions.
First of all, Wood claimed that China is on a path to double its nuclear arsenal over the next ten years with a much more modern force. “China has been modernizing its strategic nuclear forces. It’s also modernizing its non-strategic nuclear weapons that pose a very serious security concern to U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific region as well as some of our allies, and China is the least transparent of all the P5 countries,” he said. “So there’s some real concerns here about China’s buildup and we don’t really have a great sense of what that exact buildup looks like, except that we do know that China has been developing mobile ICBMs.” Even if so, this would bring China’s total number of warheads to about 650 plus or minus, still less than half of the number of strategic warheads allowed to the U.S. and Russia by New START.
“We think it’s imperative that China comes to the table, and there will be a seat there in Vienna for them. We hope they will show up,” Wood said. “China has been free from any kind of constraints on them with regard to arms control, because the treaties the U.S. and Russia have agreed on in the past [did] not include China,” Wood went on. “So we think it is long overdue for China to come to the table, and that’s an imperative, that is a priority for this administration and we’re going to continue to push until China does take the responsible position and come to the table.”
