The Bush administration, seeking to overcome Chinese opposition to its missile defense program, intends to tell leaders in Beijing that it has no objections to the country's plans to build up its small fleet of nuclear missiles, according to senior administration officials.
One senior official said that, in the future, the US and China may also discuss resuming underground nuclear tests if they are needed to assure the safety and reliability of their arsenals. Such a move, however, might allow China to improve its nuclear warheads and lead to the end of a worldwide moratorium on nuclear testing.
Both messages appear to mark a significant change in American policy. For years, the US has discouraged China and all other nations from increasing the size or capability of their nuclear arsenals, and from nuclear tests of any kind.
The purpose of the new approach, administration officials say, is to convince China that the administration's plans for a missile shield are not aimed at undercutting China's nuclear arsenal, but rather at countering threats from so-called rogue states.
The administration decided its strategy during a review by officials preparing for Bush's trip to China next month. The president's top advisers concluded that China's nuclear modernization is inevitable and that they might as well gain advantage by acquiescing to it.
"We know the Chinese will enhance their nuclear capability anyway, and we are going to say to them, `We're not going to tell you not to do it,'" one senior official deeply involved in formulating the strategy said last week. "Why panic? They are modernizing anyway."
But word of the new approach drew scathing criticism from Joseph Biden, who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"This is absolutely absurd," he said yesterday. "It shows that these guys will go to any length to build a national missile defense, even one they can't define. Their headlong, headstrong, irrational and theological desire to build a missile
defense sends the wrong message to the Chinese and to the whole world," especially to India, which he said would try to counter any Chinese buildup.
"This is taking 50 years of trying to control nuclear weapons and standing it on its head."
Though Beijing has long planned to build up its arsenal, outside experts and a review last year by the CIA have warned that an American missile shield could prompt China to expand its deterrent even further, possibly setting off an arms race across Asia.
Beijing has a fleet of fewer than two dozen nuclear missiles capable of reaching the US, as part of a minimal deterrent that Mao Tse-tung (毛澤東) created in the 1950s and 1960s. China is now developing mobile, solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles that would be far more likely to withstand a first nuclear strike.
A report to Congress last year noted that intelligence officials predicted in 1999 that by 2015 China was likely to have a "few tens of missiles with smaller nuclear warheads" that could hit the US.
One such missile, the DF-31, may be able to reach northwestern edges of the US; the longer-range DF-41, under development, could reach much of the continental US.
Some in the Bush administration believe that the Chinese buildup may be larger and that by acquiescing to it, Washington may defuse objections to a missile defense. "At most missile defense might speed up their program slightly, or prompt them to build a few more missiles," one official said. "But they are on that path anyway, and may add only modestly to it."
A number of China experts disagree. Robert A. Manning of the Council on Foreign Relations, who published a lengthy study last year of China's nuclear capability, said on Friday: "It's hard for me to accept the idea that what we do is totally irrelevant. If you are a Chinese military planner, your architecture and force structure depend on what the United States is doing, first and foremost."
In an interview last month with the publisher, editors and reporters of The New York Times, China's president, Jiang Zemin (江澤民), deflected a question about China's response to the missile defense plan and suggested that his visitors knew more about the size and abilities of China's fleet than he did. "I hope he was joking," one of Bush's top aides said.
As for the ban on nuclear testing, both the US and China have signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Bush administration has made clear that it wants that accord to remain in indefinite limbo in the Senate, which rejected it two years ago.
One senior official said this week that China may, in future years, be given the go-ahead by the US to resume underground tests of its nuclear weapons, and suggested that the US might also some day want to resume such testing.
"We don't see the need for any tests, by anyone, in the near future," the official said. "But there may, at some point, be a need by both countries to make sure that their warheads are safe and reliable."
Whether the administration's new approach to China is considered a change in American policy or simply, as the administration insists, a recognition of nuclear reality, the implications could be enormous.
At home Bush risks angering the right wing of his own party, which has long protested any buildup in Chinese arms.
And Democratic critics of the missile defense plan, like Biden have also argued that even before the technology for a missile shield is proven, Bush may set off an arms race that could include China as well as the world's newest nuclear states, India and Pakistan.
"The question is, can you accept another 50 or 60 nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at the United States at a time that Americans believe that they are no longer being targeted?" asked Bates Gill, an expert in Chinese nuclear strategy at the Brookings Institution.
Gill, who says he believes the administration is "right to acknowledge the practical inevitability" of the modernization of Chinese nuclear forces, also warns of a possible side effect should China incorporate new technologies to defeat the missile shield.
"We shouldn't be sanguine about the possibility of China proliferating anti-missile defense technology in the future, if the US-China relationship goes badly," he said. "That could include basic decoy and shrouding technology for Pakistan, and potentially Iran and North Korea."
The new American stance could also have a major impact on the nuclear politics of Taiwan and Japan. Every major nuclear advance on the mainland leads to renewed calls in Taiwan for an independent nuclear force -- something the US quashed during the Cold War. American intelligence agencies keep a close eye on Taiwan to make sure its program is not resuscitated.
As the only country ever to have suffered the devastation of nuclear attacks, Japan has long renounced nuclear weapons, and it is almost inconceivable that it would reverse that policy as long as it can depend on American nuclear protection.
But Japanese officials have said privately that while they endorse missile shield research, they worry that it would only encourage China to speed its positioning of both medium and long-range nuclear missiles. They fear that any placement of theater missile defenses in Japan -- where 60,000 American forces are based -- could provoke China to increase the number of weapons targeted there.
In interviews, administration officials dismiss the argument that the missile defense would set off any kind of arms race in Asia.
"The Indians know what the Chinese are doing, and so does everyone else," a senior administration official said. "If we canceled the whole missile defense program tomorrow morning, China would still build more and better missiles, and other countries would figure out their response."
Until now, there have been few discussions between China and the Bush administration about missile defenses. In the late spring, James A. Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, was sent to Beijing to give a rough outline of the administration's plans to his Chinese counterparts.
Instead, the administration's focus has been on talking to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and winning his agreement to abandon the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bars most of the tests for a missile shield that Bush hopes to begin in Alaska next year.
American officials have raised with Putin and his aides the possibility that Russia could contribute to the missile shield project, and that some of its technology might be incorporated in it.
So far, though, that has not resulted in any significant progress in the talks. American officials speculate that serious negotiations will not begin until Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld comes up with a plan for deep, mutual reductions in American and Russian forces.
But there have been no equivalent conversations with China. That will have to change now that Bush's trip is only six weeks away. Bush has made it clear he plans to spend a considerable amount of time on that trip trying to allay Chinese fears about his plans, much as he has attempted, with mixed success, in Europe.
But because China has such a minimal deterrent, he cannot make the kind of offer that he has made to Russia for a joint reduction of nuclear forces. The offer to allow China to improve its nuclear fleet -- and perhaps test it -- amounts to what one senior defense official calls "the incentive package" for the Chinese leadership and its military.
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