Did China conduct a secret nuclear test in June 2020 as the US claims? And was it done with an eye on India since the crisis in eastern Ladakh was underway? China scholar Manoj Kewalramani of the Takshashila Institution said linking the US claim of a Chinese nuclear test to the Galwan crisis was “a stretch”.
“First, the preparation work for a nuclear test and keeping it secret is substantial. These are not activities that can be done in a rush,” he said. “Second, it is quite a leap of imagination to assume that while India and China refrain from firing bullets along the LAC, Beijing would signal strength to Delhi through a nuclear test.”
Kewalramani added that the logic behind such an assumption was flawed. “Implicit in the argument that Galwan was an excuse or cover for a test is the view that Beijing did not mind going to war with India, if that is where escalation led, simply to cover for a test. That would be foolhardy.”
Brig Arun Sahgal of the Forum for Strategic Initiatives pointed out that China never tests with India in mind, nor for that matter does India with China in mind.
Clearly there could be something bigger at play here. China, insteady of denying it, relied on circumlocution. China’s Ambassador for Disarmament Shen Jian issued a statement which curiously, did not address the US allegation.
“China notes that the U.S. continues in its statement to hype up the so-called China nuclear threat. China firmly opposes such false narratives,” he said. “It (the U.S.) is the culprit for the aggravation of the arms race.”
But the US Under Secretary for Arms Control Thomas DiNanno, cited a date June 22, 2020, as the date of the test, he said it had “measureable yields”, and China used a method called “decoupling” which is a technique designed to weaken seismic detection of a nuclear test.
But Robert Floyd, Head of the Vienna-based Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, said the body’s international monitoring system “did not detect any event consistent with the characteristics of a nuclear weapon test explosion” at the time of the alleged Chinese test. Further detailed analyses have not altered that determination, he said.
Daryl Kimball, Director of the Arms Control Association, said the U.S. should take any credible evidence that Russia or China are conducting secret nuclear tests to the treaty’s governing body and pursue technical talks with China and Russia.
He addressed a point that is being widely speculated upon:
“Any U.S. resumption of testing in response to such allegations would not only be technically unnecessary but foolish and counterproductive because it would set off a chain reaction of nuclear testing by other nuclear-armed states,” he warned.
Is the US itching to resume nuclear tests? Reuters reports that in October last year, President Trump had ordered his military brass to “immediately resume its process for testing nuclear weapons.” That may have been done with an eye on New START, which expired a few days ago, and which curbed the strategic weapons of the US and Russia.
Trump wants negotiations on a new treaty that would include China since there are US projections that it will have over 1000 nuclear weapons by 2030. China has made it clear it will not take part in any such negotiations since it has 600 nuclear weapons compared to around 4000 for the US and Russia.
Reuters reports that Tomas Nagy, a nuclear expert at security think-tank GLOBSEC in Bratislava, said Washington had chosen this moment to call out Beijing for alleged secret testing from nearly six years ago because it felt Beijing was unlikely to cooperate on the issue.
“This is a reflection of the fact that the Americans have actually understood by now that for the next couple of years, there’s going to be no motion in a positive direction with the Chinese. So they decided to disclose this information.”
China’s obfuscation instead of a straight denial does hint at a test of some kind. But there’s precious little the world much, less India can do about it.
