Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a joint article with special envoy for arms control Marshall Billingslea, accused China’s communist regime of being opaque in its pursuit of nuclear weapons and called on Beijing to join U.S. talks with Russia on strategic arms reductions.
“The Novel Coronavirus pandemic has set the world on the brink of a communist party lie that can have significant and deadly consequences,” Pompeo and Billingaria wrote in a commentary published in Newsweek on Monday (January 4, 2021) and reproduced on the State Department website. “While the United States, our Allies and partners are again calling for transparency on the virus, we are also urging Beijing to come clean on another dangerous issue, which is Beijing’s expansion of its nuclear Arsenal in an opaque and aggressive manner.”
Unlike the United States and other nuclear powers, Beijing has refused to disclose the size of its nuclear Arsenal, how many nuclear weapons it plans to develop or how it plans to use them, the article, titled “China’s Madness in Developing Nuclear Forces,” said. China is the least transparent of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.
Pompeo and Billingsley said in their commentary that while Beijing is secretive about its nuclear activities, the United States knows that China is seeking to build a trinity of land, sea and air nuclear strike forces that would pose a threat to the U.S. homeland and U.S. forces stationed in the Indo-Pacific region.
‘Beijing has taken advantage of decades of U.S. adherence to ineffective arms-control agreements to boost its military capabilities,’ the article said. The United States, for example, has long been barred by the INF treaty from developing ground-based intermediate-range missiles, while China’s military has deployed more than 1,000 theater-range ballistic missiles along its coast.
Pompeo and Billingsleia called on Beijing to work with Washington and Moscow on a New arms control agreement covering all nuclear weapons, saying that “any New agreement to replace the New START Treaty must include China.”
The 2010 Start treaty between the United States and Russia limits each country to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads. The treaty expires next month.
The Trump administration has insisted that China should join negotiations on a new START treaty, saying that so far it has been developing nuclear weapons at will.
Beijing has refused to join the talks, saying it is unrealistic to ask China to participate in nuclear disarmament talks with the United States and Russia at the current stage because its nuclear weapons are not on the same scale as those of the Two countries. Chinese officials have also accused the US of trying to divert international attention in order to create an excuse to withdraw from the NEW Start treaty.
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