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."
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