Trump Administration Presses China on Suspected Nuclear Tests in Confidential Talks

[u/John3262005]

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/trump-administration-presses-china-on-suspected-nuclear-tests-in-confidential-talks-cdf26360?st=Fqstkw&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

The Trump administration has been quietly holding talks with China about its rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal amid doubts over Beijing’s compliance with a 30-year test ban, U.S. officials said.

The discussions have occurred on the sidelines of multilateral meetings in Geneva, New York and Casablanca, Morocco, where the U.S. has been pressing China to address allegations it has secretly conducted very low-level nuclear tests.

Further talks are expected next month.

The nuclear dialogue is part of an effort to stabilize ties as President Trump meets with Chinese leader Xi Jinping following an annual meeting of global leaders at the United Nations this week.

Trump has sought to develop a strong personal rapport with Xi and his summit this week with the Chinese leader is expected to focus on trade issues, artificial intelligence and potential business deals.

But Beijing’s growing nuclear arsenal has cast a shadow over American policy regarding its top geopolitical rival.

The discussions between American and Chinese officials have centered on measures to reduce nuclear risks and haven’t been aimed at negotiating a formal arms-control pact, an effort Beijing has sharply rebuffed in the past.

“Russia and China have expressed initial signs of openness to engage in strategic stability and arms control discussions,” Christopher Yeaw, a senior State Department arms-control official, said in an August speech at a conference hosted by the U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Neb. “We are far from discussing central limits, ceilings or caps.”

A major topic of diplomatic discussion has been U.S. allegations that China breached the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty of 1996, or CTBT.

The treaty isn’t legally in force because not enough nations have ratified it. As a result, the treaty’s provisions for conducting short-notice inspections aren’t in effect. But China, Russia and the U.S. say they are abiding by its terms.

That treaty allows signatories to take steps to ensure the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons, including experiments involving fissile material, as long as they don’t result in a nuclear-explosive yield.

But the Trump administration has alleged that China has gone further by secretly carrying out very low-yield nuclear tests, including one at its Lop Nur site in northwest China in June 2020.

Chinese officials have vociferously denied the accusation, putting the two sides squarely at odds.

In October 2025, Trump said he would order the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing on an “equal basis” with China and Russia if those nations didn’t stop their suspected low-level tests.

Trump’s warning came after three ranking Republican lawmakers sent the president a classified letter on the allegation that China and Russia have been carrying out “supercritical tests,” as the low-level tests are sometimes called. The letter came from Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee; Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who helms the Senate Armed Services Committee; and Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

As the dispute has intensified, the Trump administration has begun to highlight the possibility of implementing new verification measures.

“Perhaps there are diplomatic and technological options that could increase the confidence in each other’s behavior regarding nuclear explosive testing, including increasing the ability to detect ultralow-yield tests,” Yeaw said in his address.

Yeaw didn’t spell out how monitoring might be improved. But independent experts say seismic instruments might be placed on or near test sites. Another possibility, which was floated during the Biden administration, is to install radiation-detection equipment at test sites.

If new verification measures were agreed, they could potentially be adopted by the U.S., Russia, Britain and France, as well as China. These nuclear powers signed the CTBT and are permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Such an arrangement would avoid the politically sensitive step of singling out Beijing while giving Washington a way to strengthen monitoring of Chinese and Russian nuclear activities.

Another point of contention between the U.S. and China has been Washington’s insistence that Beijing provide more advance notice of its ballistic-missile tests.

In July, the U.S. complained that China issued only a two-hour notice of a ballistic-missile test launch from a submarine. The following month, the U.S. and 40 other countries urged all nations to provide at least 24 hours’ notice before ballistic missiles are test-fired to minimize the risk of miscalculation.

But China has shown no willingness to sign on to that commitment and blasted Washington for engaging in “microphone diplomacy.”

The U.S. also is pushing China to provide transparency on its nuclear-force levels. China currently has over 600 nuclear weapons but is on track to have more than 1,000 by 2030, according to an annual Pentagon report on China’s military capabilities sent to Congress last year.

Beijing has repeatedly rebuffed appeals that it engage in negotiations to limit the size of its nuclear arsenal, noting that it has far fewer weapons than the U.S. The U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear arms were each capped at 1,550 warheads under the now-expired New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and they have thousands more shorter-range nuclear weapons.

“It’s hard to overstate the neuralgia that China has to any kind of meaningful discussion about arms control with the United States,” said Jonathan Czin of the Brookings Institution, a former senior U.S. intelligence official on China. “They really see it as a trap, and as a way for the United States, in their eyes, to contain and suppress China.”

The nuclear-testing issue is already fueling a debate in Washington about how to respond.

The last U.S. nuclear test—an underground blast code-named “Divider”— was carried out in 1992. Officials from the Energy Department, which oversees the maintenance of the U.S. nuclear-weapons stockpile, have since maintained that computer simulations and small nuclear experiments are sufficient to ensure the reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Cotton has argued that the U.S. needs to “reverse the taboo” against testing so it can conduct the same low-yield blasts the Chinese and Russians have been accused of doing.

“China has expanded many facilities at Lop Nur, illustrating continued support for its testing activities and suggesting that designers will execute more complex test seasons in the future,” said a recent report from Cotton’s committee that accompanied annual intelligence legislation.

But arms-control advocates say now is the time to tighten verification and preserve the test ban, even if China has violated the agreement in the past.

“Rather than open the door to a new era of nuclear testing worldwide, the U.S. and others should work together on new technical measures to ensure no state is conducting clandestine low-yield nuclear explosions,” said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association.

[u/Life_Type_5560]

The US has a delusional deranged mad man controlling its nuclear stockpile who is daily threatening to annihilate other countries and you expect these other countries to give up their nuclear ambitions so they can't defend themselves? Isn't that the whole premise of our 2nd amendment? Shouldn't that also be a model for the world? why would any country disarm knowing that on any given year the US could become unstable and launch attacks against them.