Ukraine war: how China can get the world to step back from nuclear Armageddon

Hope lies in getting nuclear powers to agree to a ‘no first use’ policy. If China can persuade the US, then Britain and France are likely to fall in line
The challenge is getting Moscow on board – which is likely to require Nato to agree to ‘no first use’ against Russia and back down on its eastward expansion

Zhou Bo

Published: 1:00am, 4 Sep 2023

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No one knows how long the war in Ukraine will last. But everyone knows what the worst nightmare is: Russia unleashing nuclear weapons. The Russian leadership has repeatedly hinted at this.

Russian scholars such as Sergei Karaganov and Dmitri Trenin have recently joined the chorus, calling for tactical nuclear attacks on a Nato country, say Poland, to break “the West’s will” and convince them that Russia’s nuclear threats are no bluff.

By giving people pause, Russia’s nuclear deterrence seems to be working. But what if Moscow is not bluffing?

With the West nibbling away at its own red lines by sending more sophisticated weapons to Kyiv that were considered taboo at the beginning of the war effort, how can one rest assured that Moscow will not reach for nuclear weapons eventually?

The battle is in a stalemate. Kyiv’s attack drones have reportedly been found in Moscow. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently warned that “war is returning” to Russia. As the threat of an unspeakable horror against humanity looms larger, there is an urgent need to prevent a nuclear fallout.

Perhaps China can persuade the US to agree first to a nuclear weapons policy of “no first use”, which can then be joined by Britain, France and finally – hopefully – Russia.

A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile launcher rolls along Red Square during the Victory Day parade on May 9, 2017. Russia has the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear warheads. Photo: AP

China and the US have reached nuclear weapons agreements before. After India and Pakistan launched nuclear tests in 1998, China and the US, in a rare show of solidarity, declared they would not target their nuclear weapons at each other. This led to a joint statement in 2000 from the five nuclear-weapon states of China, the US, Britain, France and Russia that their nuclear weapons would not target each other or any other state.

More recently, in January last year, a month before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the five nuclear power powers agreed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”.

So why can’t they pledge a “no first use” policy? Such a stance would neither exclude nuclear retaliation nor neutralise a nuclear power’s ability to deter an attack.

For China, “no first use” has been its ironclad policy since its detonation of a nuclear device in 1964. Relations with Russia will not change China’s time-honoured policy. The Biden administration has declared that it “would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners”. This stance is not so far away from that of Beijing.

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Protests over nukes as G7 leaders talk Ukraine and China in Hiroshima

More than any other country, the US, with its overwhelming conventional military superiority, can afford to make a “no first use” commitment on nuclear weapons. There is hardly a military mission one can cite that the US cannot accomplish with its conventional weapons. The assertion that it needs nuclear weapons to defend its allies is also questionable.

North Korea is the only country that resorts to nuclear blackmail. But even though it has declared its right to pre-emptive nuclear strikes in a new law, this is clearly merely part of a strategy to draw attention.

01:59

North Korea calls for destruction of US at rally marking Korean war anniversary

Unless Kim Jong-un’s regime is in jeopardy, it is hard to see why he would launch a suicidal nuclear attack on South Korea or Japan, and invite a devastating retaliation. The Korean peninsula is only 1,100km long. The lingering radioactive dust would make any victory meaningless.

In 2001, Russia and China agreed not to be the first to use nuclear weapons against each other. If Beijing and Washington can agree on a “no first use” nuclear weapons policy, then it is entirely possible for Britain and France, two American allies, to reach the same deal with China.

The challenge is to get Russia in as well, but this is not impossible. President Vladimir Putin should know that nuclear weapons are not really game changers. America’s possession of nuclear weapons did not help it in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghan wars. Nuclear weapons did not help the Soviet Union either in its Afghan war. And they haven’t helped Russia mitigate Ukraine’s strong resistance against the invasion.

02:56

Drones allegedly from Ukraine hit high-rise buildings in Moscow central districts

This is probably why, in spite of his thinly veiled hints, Putin has never overtly threatened to use nuclear weapons. Instead, he reiterated in a China-Russia joint declaration during President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow in March that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

If the deepest concern of the US-led Nato is that Putin might resort to nuclear weapons, it needs to offer an off-ramp – that is, that Nato unilaterally promises “no first use” of nuclear weapons against Russia under any circumstances.

Nato can afford to do this. As the world’s largest military alliance, Nato has 31 members that include three nuclear weapon states, and conventional forces that far outnumber Russia’s. It is hard to imagine why it should ever need to launch a nuclear strike on Russia first.

As Russia makes new nuclear threat, leaders must renew deterrence vow

Perhaps the final solution to the defusing of nuclear threats on the European continent lies in Nato’s thinking of the unthinkable: a pledge of no further expansion after Sweden joins. Nato membership is confined to European countries and, after Sweden, there are few countries queuing up anyway. Only three, namely Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia and Ukraine, are on the waiting list.

Bosnia and Herzegovina will add little weight to Nato’s military strength. Georgia has already had a war with Russia, in part because it wishes to join Nato. While the end game may still be unclear, Nato needs no soul-searching to realise that a “forever war” with a nuclear power would be lethally dangerous.

Senior Colonel Zhou Bo (ret) is a senior fellow of the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University and a China Forum expert