On Friday 15 May 2009, Dr Ron Huisken (Senior Fellow, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University) addressed members and guests of the Institute on 'Sino-American Nuclear Intersections'.
Synopsis:
For essentially all of the nuclear era, China has ranked among the countries whose behaviour the US has endeavoured to influence through a declared capability to bring nuclear force to bear against it. The US-China nuclear story was obscured by that of the superpowers during the Cold War and for some time afterwards. Now it has become commonplace to observe that the pivotal bilateral relationship in the 21st century will be that between the US and China, giving this story greater saliency. The curious thing about this history is not only the qualitative variation in China's status within US nuclear war plans but the weak correlation between the dates of these variations and the dates of what most observers would identify as the key events that punctuated US-China relations over this issues that will bedevil any ambition to look beyond a more effective regime to contain the proliferation of nuclear weapons to the complete elimination of these weapons.
[IISS-Asia is pleased to acknowledge the financial support of the Australian Department of Defence for this seminar series.]
