China-Russia Cooperation in Nuclear Deterrence

Abstract

Nuclear issues have historically played an important role in the development of relations between Moscow and Beijing, acting as a source of both potential discord and emergent cooperation. From 1964, when China conducted its first nuclear test, until Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s tenure in the 1980s, nuclear relations between the Soviet Union and China were explicitly adversarial. The normalization of Sino-Soviet relations introduced an era of implicitly adversarial relations that lasted until the Ukraine crisis. During this phase, Russia’s concerns about China’s growing military power and its resulting determination to maintain nuclear deterrence of China remained apparent. Since the onset of the Ukraine crisis, Russia and China have built an increasingly close relationship, leading to a new phase of implicitly cooperative nuclear relations featuring coordinated efforts to maintain nuclear deterrence of the United States. The two countries jointly oppose US efforts to build missile defense systems and high-precision conventional weapons. They coordinate their positions on such issues as multilateral arms control and the post-INF strategic landscape. Russia is helping China to build a missile attack early warning system. Growing levels of defense cooperation raise the possibility of coordinated efforts to maintain nuclear deterrence of the United States in a crisis.