Enter the Dragon: China and the Future of Arms Control

The US and Russia are publicly circling ways to prevent an unconstrained collapse of strategic arms control as the last remaining treaty between them — New Start — approaches its February 2026 expiry. Russia has proposed continuing to observe New Start’s central limits on deployed strategic nuclear weapons after the treaty expires, while Washington has not formally committed to such an arrangement. New Start caps each side at 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads, alongside limits on deployed delivery systems. There is a wild card in these calculations, however — China.

US concerns over China’s expanding strategic nuclear arsenal and large intermediate-range missile force, and China’s concerns about US nuclear posture and missile defense, create stresses that threaten to undermine any attempt to preserve the New Start framework beyond 2026. Washington has argued that future arms control must eventually reflect a more complex, multipolar nuclear landscape, while China has resisted joining talks dominated by the US-Russia dyad. Beijing has consistently argued it will not enter trilateral negotiations until the US and Russia further reduce and stabilize their much larger arsenals — a modern-day Catch-22.

For the third time — following arms control white papers published in 1995 and 2005 — China has issued a formal document outlining its position on nuclear arms control. A key passage from the November 2025 white paper reads: “Countries possessing the largest nuclear arsenals should fulfill their special and primary responsibilities for nuclear disarmament and continue to make drastic and substantive reductions in their nuclear arsenals in a verifiable, irreversible and legally binding manner, so as to create the conditions for complete and thorough nuclear disarmament.”

China is placing the onus for further reductions squarely on Russia and the US. This comes at a time when Washington has accused Beijing of engaging in a major strategic nuclear modernization program, with US defense assessments projecting that China could possess up to 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035 if current trends continue. China, for its part, has pointed to updated US nuclear employment planning — which now explicitly factors in China alongside Russia as a potential peer nuclear competitor — as justification for strengthening its own strategic deterrent.

A Strategic Imbalance

China was the last of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s five declared nuclear-weapon states to acquire nuclear weapons, following the US, the Soviet Union/Russia, the UK and France. Beijing has long emphasized a nuclear posture premised on no first use and a comparatively restrained force structure. For many years, independent estimates placed China’s arsenal in the low hundreds, largely deployed on older liquid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles.

China’s nuclear forces were historically weighted toward its intermediate-range missile inventory, which Beijing argued was sufficient to deter regional threats. The US, however, viewed China’s large intermediate-range missile force as strategically destabilizing, particularly because the US itself was prohibited from fielding comparable ground-launched systems under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which entered into force in 1988. The US withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019, after accusing Russia of sustained noncompliance, and subsequently began adjusting its force posture in the Indo-Pacific, including the development of conventionally armed, ground-launched intermediate-range systems and expanded missile-defense capabilities.

China has responded by accelerating the modernization of both its intermediate and strategic nuclear forces, citing a deteriorating security environment. This, in turn, has reinforced US planning assumptions that must now account for two near-peer nuclear competitors, even if the US continues to treat Russian and Chinese arsenals as distinct rather than formally aggregated. Any significant increase in China’s strategic arsenal nonetheless complicates the political sustainability of New Start-style limits, particularly as the US weighs how to deter both Moscow and Beijing simultaneously.

Complicating matters further is the fact that New Start’s warhead caps are politically reversible once the treaty expires. Both the US and Russia maintain thousands of non-deployed nuclear warheads that could be returned to service by “uploading” additional warheads onto existing delivery systems. While earlier treaties sought to eliminate multiple-warhead missiles, New Start itself does not prohibit multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs, instead relying on aggregate limits and verification. If New Start constraints fall away entirely, both Washington and Moscow could rapidly expand their deployed arsenals — a reality that, from Beijing’s perspective, renders US-Russian limits inherently unstable.

China must also contend with nuclear dynamics beyond the US-Russia relationship. Russia fields nonstrategic nuclear forces unconstrained by New Start, while the US retains a wide range of nuclear-capable delivery platforms outside the treaty’s scope. India continues to expand its nuclear strike capabilities, and both France and the UK have updated their nuclear doctrines to reflect a more globalized security outlook.

China Is a Player

For decades, the global nuclear balance was framed almost exclusively through the lens of US-Soviet, and later US-Russian, arms control — a rational approach when their arsenals peaked at roughly 31,000 warheads for the US and around 45,000 for the Soviet Union. As those stockpiles declined, however, the relative weight of other nuclear-armed states inevitably increased.

Today, China has emerged as a pivotal factor in debates over the future of arms control. Purely bilateral frameworks no longer capture the strategic reality confronting policymakers, even if no consensus exists on how to move beyond them. In Washington, the perception of deepening strategic alignment between Russia and China has sharpened concerns about deterrence sufficiency, while Beijing continues to reject any framework that treats it as numerically equivalent to the US or Russia.

From China’s perspective, meaningful arms control remains contingent on deeper US-Russian reductions. From the US perspective, sustaining existing limits without addressing China’s trajectory is increasingly difficult to justify domestically. This tension sits at the heart of the current impasse.

Even if China were eventually persuaded to join multilateral talks, fundamental disagreements would remain. US missile-defense ambitions and post-INF force development are red lines for Beijing, which views such systems as inherently destabilizing. Advances in either area are likely to prompt further Chinese nuclear expansion — a path Beijing insists it would prefer to avoid but sees as unavoidable in the absence of strategic equilibrium.

The central message of China’s latest arms control white paper is that contrary to portrayals of an unchecked nuclear buildup, Beijing presents its posture as one aimed at preserving stability in an increasingly volatile world. Whether one accepts this framing or not, the document makes clear that China sees itself not as a passive bystander, but as an essential actor in shaping the next phase of nuclear arms control. Any future framework that ignores that reality is unlikely to endure.

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