Opinion | Nuclear Talks With China Are Essential and Long Overdue

After months of troubled relations, and then some tentative steps to bridge the gap between the United States and China, there is one glaring omission: American and Chinese military leaders still don’t communicate with one another directly. That’s important because those lines of communication are the best way to avoid the kind of misunderstandings or overreactions that can lead to actual conflict. That’s why it’s encouraging that the countries plan to meet on Monday to discuss arms control.

The talks come at a perilous moment for the systems of global controls, painstakingly built over decades, to avoid nuclear conflict. The landmark Cold War-era treaties between the United States and Russia have fallen by the wayside, one by one, with few meaningful restraints remaining and even less good will to negotiate successor agreements. The last major agreement, New START, expires in February 2026.

This week, the Russian government said it was formally withdrawing from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, though it said it would continue to abide by the terms of that agreement. The United States, for its part, is in the midst of upgrading its own nuclear weapons.

As the United States and Russia lose their safeguards, the Chinese government is expanding its nuclear arsenal. For decades, the People’s Liberation Army has felt secure with a few hundred nuclear weapons. But over the past few years, the government began a building spree that, if it continues, would leave China with an arsenal of 1,500 nuclear weapons by 2035, according to an estimate released last month by the Pentagon. Currently, the United States and Russia have about 1,670 deployed weapons each, with thousands more in storage.

Arms races tend to acquire a self-sustaining momentum. The danger of the Chinese expansion is that the United States and Russia may each feel that they then need to expand their own arsenals to match the combined total of the other two powers. That’s a formula for the construction and maintenance of arsenals without end.

Such competition would be alarming even if the relations between these three superpowers were otherwise harmonious. Throw in unpredictable points of tension around trade, the military buildup in the South China Sea, the future of Taiwan, the war in Ukraine, espionage in cyberspace and a dozen other fault lines, and the nuclear buildup risks triggering a global crisis with little margin for error and few offramps.