May 9th, 2013
China’s recent defense white paper did not include a reiteration of the nation’s traditional commitment to never use nuclear weapons first. The omission was not a signal that China abandoned no first use, despite U.S. speculation to the contrary. Read More
April 23rd, 2013
On April 16, the Chinese Ministry of Defense released a white paper that mentioned Chinese nuclear weapons but did not contain familiar language expressing China’s declaratory policy, particularly that China would never use nuclear weapons first, under any circumstances. This commitment to “no first use” has been a bedrock of Chinese nuclear weapons policy since the announcement was first made in 1964, immediately following China’s first nuclear weapons test. Read More
April 13th, 2013
U.S. and Chinese leaders both seek a denuclearized North Korea. But they disagree, fundamentally, on how that can be achieved. U.S. analysts and observers frame that disagreement inaccurately, contributing to misunderstanding that unnecessarily undermines strategic trust between China and the United States. Read More
April 12th, 2013
On Wednesday, the Obama administration released its FY2014 federal budget request, more than two months after the normal deadline. The reasons for the delay – uncertainty due to the Budget Control Act, the sequester, and the complications around them – are well known, but even in that light some of the information released was thin in the extreme. Read More
April 7th, 2013
October 2003: The Bartlett administration’s equivalent of Kurt Campbell explains why a North
Korean piano player cannot be allowed to defect to the United States.
Recent U.S. press reports suggest Chinese frustration with recent North Korean provocations could lead to a shift in Chinese policy towards their belligerent neighbor. Read More
March 6th, 2013
Dick Garwin and I recently wrote an op-ed making the case that it’s time for the United States to take steps to reduce the dangers posed by large nuclear arsenals. We argue that President Obama should reduce the total U.S. arsenal—short-range and long-range, deployed and stored—to 1,000 weapons and eliminate the U.S. Read More
February 13th, 2013
After speculation that he would do more, President Obama ended up saying very little about U.S. nuclear weapons in his State of the Union speech: Read More
December 12th, 2012
Today we released a free, interactive web map of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, the collection of facilities that produce, maintain and dismantle U.S. nuclear weapons. The map is part of a larger UCS project evaluating and making recommendations for the future of the complex in light of the fact that the U.S. Read More
December 8th, 2012
Newly appointed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping may have broken new ground in Chinese nuclear weapons policy this week. Xi, who is also the new chair of China’s Central Military Commission (CMC), gave what China’s Wenhui Bao characterized as a “major address” to a delegation from China’s Second Artillery during a meeting in Beijing on 5 December. Read More
November 15th, 2012
The 2012 Annual Report to Congress from the U.S.- China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) recommends that Congress seek to “access disparities in estimates of the size and disposition of China’s nuclear forces.” The Commission, established in October 2000 in the wake of the highly politicized debates about U.S. Read More
© 2013
