Benjamin Hautecouverture
A founding argument of China’s nuclear policy, the No-First-Use (NFU) principle has been the subject of intense debate in the global strategic community and within the institutional framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review process in recent years. It has to be said that this historic pillar of Chinese nuclear thinking is still not well understood by the public in the West, or even in Russia. At the same time, there is a number of concordant indications that China’s arsenal is increasing, albeit in very opaque proportions. This article attempts to place NFU in the context of its doctrinal development to understand the role it has played in Chinese strategic nuclear thinking over the last sixty years and to assess the extent to which it is still a factor of strategic stability today.
Diplomatic tool and capacity scenarios
Chinese diplomacy’s renewed insistence on NFU of nuclear weapons has given rise to numerous arguments since the launch of the current review cycle of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of nuclear weapons (NPT). A working paper entitled No-first-use of Nuclear Weapons Initiative was submitted by the Chinese delegation at the second session of the Preparatory Committee for the next NPT Review Conference, held in Geneva from 22 July to 2 August 2024. In this paper, China encouraged all the nuclear-weapon states (P5) to negotiate and conclude a treaty on “mutual no-first-use of nuclear weapons” or to issue a political declaration to that effect. This was nothing new. As early as 1994, the country – which had joined the NPT two years earlier – had submitted a Draft Treaty on No-First Use of Nuclear Weapons to the four other nuclear-weapon states.
No comments:
Post a Comment