 Good morning. Good morning, everyone. My name is Bill Burns. I'm the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And it really is a pleasure to welcome all of you to what I think is a program today. It's also a great pleasure for me to welcome back to Carnegie on our panel a couple of very distinguished funds from Carnegie. Adam Miller, who formerly was the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, went during the time when I had a visitor in Moscow and later a wonderful colleague as assistant secretary. Also Evan Maderos, who a number of years ago was a junior fellow at Carnegie and has gone on to do wonderful things as a scholar and in government. In government most recently as a senior advisor on Asia. Evan, and it's a particular pleasure. Now that he's the managing director of the Eurasia group, but also a non resident senior scholar here at Carnegie. It's a pleasure to welcome back a wonderful colleague and friend over a number of years in Brooks. This is my first work at the NSC staff many years ago, who's gone on to make enormous contributions to US national security policy. Not only at the White House, but at the arms control and disarmament agency and most recently at the Department of Energy and who led the start negotiations just as well as the start negotiations. And finally, it really is a pleasure to welcome a wonderful Carnegie colleague, Lee Bin, whose article in arms control today last December on Chinese nuclear thinking really is the centerpiece for today's discussion and for our panel, and whose work over a number of years really does embody the very best that the Carnegie Endowment as a global institution has to offer the world. So once again, thank you all for coming today and I hope you'll join me in offering a warm welcome to our panelists. Well, thank you very much everybody. Thank you Bill for that very warm introduction. My name is Evan Medeiros. I'm going to be moderating the session today. These issues of Chinese nuclear doctrine and strategy are near and dear to my heart as somebody that's worked on these issues at the Carnegie Endowment at the arms control association. So I was very encouraged to see that arms control today remains alive and well and it was the host of Lee Bin's excellent, excellent article, but also more importantly because the nuclear issues are ones that are central to big questions of strategic stability in the U.S.-China relationship. They're ones that I worked on when I was at the National Security Council and so I'm glad to see that scholarship and activism on these issues continue today. What I'd like to do is ask Lee Bin to begin the presentation, 10 to 15 minutes to outline the key issues outlined in his excellent article. Invite Rose and Lytton to make some comments and reactions and we'll get a conversation going and then open it up to you for your ideas and your thoughts. Thank you. So Lee Bin. Thank you Evan and thank you Bill. I'm so honored to have the discussion today. And back to 2000, I believe Evan and I had a lot of discussions on this issue and he was really a pioneer on this subject. So today I'm so happy to explain my ideas and to have discussion moderated by Evan. Today I'm going to explain how we Chinese make calculation behind our nuclear weapon policy. What is our nuclear philosophy? There are several reasons for us to consider this subject. For many decades China has kept a small nuclear force and low-alertine status. There are two theories about why China did so. The theory is that because China had very limited resources and low-level technical support, so China had to do so. This is one theory. According to this theory, now China has more resources and more advanced technologies. So everything would change. This is one theory. There are another theories that China chose a small nuclear force and low-level or alerting level because the Chinese believe that this is a good choice. And China made calculations according to its own understanding about the roles of nuclear weapons. So the research is really important for the international scholars to understand China's nuclear strategy, nuclear culture, nuclear philosophy. It is also very important for the Chinese scholars to have public debate within China. So we have two purposes, one in the national and another domestic purpose. Today I will explain two issues. Why is nuclear terminology in China and why is the Chinese paradigm for secret study? So I will begin with nuclear terminology in China. The first group of nuclear terms I want to explain include security and safety. In English, security is about how to avoid a human attack. And safety is about how to avoid accidents and natural disasters. In Chinese, however, there is only one word that is ancient. Ancient includes the meanings of the two words. So in China, the assumption is that the consequences of security problems and safety problems are very similar. So we should treat them together. We should use the same system to deal with two different kinds of things. But here, in the US states, people treat the two kinds of issues separately. Nuclear safety is a safety issue. Nuclear security is a security issue. In China, we consider that we look at the similarities of the two kinds of issues. So in China, this is called comprehensive security theory. According to this theory, we should not emphasize only one side while ignoring the other side. For example, the comprehensive security theory allows China to optimize this nuclear weapon system in the big framework. That is, to treat safety and security issues at the same level. And in China, we need to balance the power of nuclear weapons and the safety of nuclear weapons at the same level. Or this could explain why China chose to have a low readiness of nuclear weapon launch. Because that could significantly reduce safety problems. Another group of words I would like to explain is nuclear deterrence and nuclear compelence. According to the US perspective, nuclear deterrence and nuclear compelence are distinctly visible. We can tell the difference between the two ideas or two coercive actions. Our compelence is to change the state quo. And deterrence is to maintain the state quo. The definitions work very well for isolated, big conflicts. If a conflict is isolated and big, then we can indeed tell the difference between deterrence and compelence. But if big conflicts come from escalation, that is always the case. Big conflicts come from small conflicts. Small conflicts may escalate to big conflicts. So in that case, it may not be easy to tell the difference between deterrence and compelence. The reason is that it is very difficult to figure out who will change the state quo first. Let me give you an example. You launch a conventional aggression and then you use your nuclear weapons to deter the conventional responses from your enemy. So in this case, there are two steps. The first step is that you launch conventional aggression. The second step is that you use your nuclear weapons to deter conventional responses from your enemy. If you look at only the second step, your corrosion is deterrence because you deter conventional responses from your enemy. But if we look at the combination of the two steps, first and second, then apparently you change the state quo first. So your nuclear weapons are used to change the state quo. So your corrosion is not deterrence, it's compelence. So the Chinese look at the other side of the issue and believe that deterrence and compelence may not be distinguishable. And China always worries about the companion effect of nuclear weapons. The third group of words I'd like to explain is arms race. According to the U.S. understanding, arms race is always about security dynamics. You develop some nuclear weapons to help your national security and I would feel being threatened. So I may want to increase the number of my nuclear weapons to respond to your increase. And then you would feel being threatened and then you do the same thing. So that kind of dynamic is the reason of nuclear arms race. That is the idea, American idea. But the Chinese perspective is very different. In China, people look at another kind of arms race. That is, arms race is about global hedge money. The U.S. states want to show that it was a world leader. The Soviet Union wanted to show that it was a world leader. So neither side would want the other side to have more nuclear weapons. Otherwise their allies would not listen to them, would not respect them. So this kind of dynamic encouraged the U.S. states and the Soviet Union to have more and more nuclear weapons. So when the Chinese talk about nuclear arms race, it is always about such kind of arms race. Arms race driven by the ambition of global hedge money. China has a commitment that is not to have nuclear arms race with any other country. So this is my interpretation of this commitment. That is, China would not seek quantitative nuclear parity with the U.S. states. But that does not suggest that China would exclude responses to security dynamics. For example, if the U.S. states developed missile defense and China feels that that is a threat to China, China would develop more nuclear weapons or consider that option to respond to U.S. missile defense. China does not consider this kind of dynamic as an arms race. So China does not exclude that option. Now I'm going to explain the Chinese secret paradigm that is a little different from the U.S. one. In the United States, people, scholars identify national secret threat. The national secret threat is usually a foreign enemy that has KVT and intention to hurt U.S. states. But if a foreign enemy has big KVT and big intention to hurt U.S. states, this enemy is considered to be a big threat. This is a very good paradigm. The reason is that it is easy to use the paradigm and it is easy to understand the paradigm. But in China, we have another paradigm, another analysis framework. That is security challenges. But security challenges is a situation. It is a dangerous situation for China. It is not an enemy. For example, corruption is a national security challenge for China. For example, U.S. weapons sale to Taiwan. This situation is a national security challenge to China. So the challenges and the oranges may be inside China or outside China or both. Let me explain a few examples. One is the U.S. project on nuclear penetration warhead. The George W. Bush administration had a small project on nuclear penetration warhead. According to the U.S. security paradigm, the investment was so small. So that project would bring very little new KVT to the United States. And the primary purpose of the project was to counter deeply buried targets in proliferation country. For the two reasons, China should not worry. Little new KVT and little intention against China. But according to the Chinese paradigm, China worried so much for an important reason. Because nuclear penetration warhead is a technical nuclear weapon. If United States works on technical nuclear warhead, it sends a signal, a message to what that nuclear warheads are usable. That would hurt the nuclear taboo against use of nuclear warheads. It would lower the bar of nuclear weapon use. That would hurt China's national interests, especially China's commitment of no first use. For that reason, China worried. Another situation is technical lagging. China always worries that other countries would develop more advanced technologies. While China does not understand much about the new defense technologies. Such kind of situation is called technical lagging. And most Chinese believe that technical lagging would invite aggression from other countries. So a lot of Chinese research projects are aimed to understand new defense technologies. That does not China has a plan to deploy these technologies. The goal is to understand the technology. One example is neutron bomb. For a while, the Chinese scientists believed that neutron bomb is the third generation nuclear weapons. The first generation is fission bomb. The second generation is fusion bomb. So neutron bomb would be the third generation. It would be a totally new technology. So China had research on neutron bomb. And then the Chinese nuclear scientists figured out that neutron bomb is not the third generation. It's a small hydrogen bomb. So China decided not to deploy neutron bomb because it is not in consistent with China's no first use commitment. Lastly, I will explain China's concerns over missile defense. Basically, there are two concerns in China. One is that the US missile defense system would neutralize China's military capability. And we can understand China's concern by both the Chinese security paradigm and the US security paradigm. So in the US-China nuclear dialogue, we have had some discussions on this concern. But in China, there is another concern. That is the development of missile defense in the US states would bring US states a lot of new defense technologies. New ideas, new systems. They may not be missile defense. They may be something else, but they are new technologies. So China worried that China would fall behind again. So this is a concern about technical lagging. So from the mid-1980s, China began to do research on missile defense to understand the technology. The purpose was to understand missile defense technology rather than deploy a missile defense system. Because this concern is based on the Chinese security paradigm. So in the US-China nuclear dialogue, we do not have much discussion on this concern. I think I should stop here and very much look forward to the comments from my colleagues. Well, thank you, Li Bin. That was a fantastic presentation. I sort of think of both the presentation in the article as a rosetta stone of sorts. I mean, you're highlighting Chinese conceptions of security and safety, the difference between nuclear deterrence and propellance, Chinese use of the arms race, the focus on security situations. That's all fascinating. I would encourage folks to read the article because there's an additional point in the article that Li Bin ran out of time to raise, which is the way in which Chinese strategists give equal weight to both security concerns and economic concerns as they make national security decisions, which I found to be a very, very fascinating insight. So I think what we saw in Li Bin's presentation is sort of the best of what an institution like Carnegie can produce. How many other institutions can bring together both Americans and Chinese government, non-government to work on these kind of complicated issues? So with that, let me ask Rose and Linton to provide some of their views. I'd ask you to point out areas where you agree or disagree with Li Bin, and then of course talk a little bit about the implications for U.S.-China strategic stability and what this means for how the U.S. and China should talk about these issues going forward. Very good. And thank you very much. I was actually asked to talk about our interactions with the Chinese on a government to government level on nuclear policy issues, including strategy and doctrine. I will come to that in a moment, but I was fascinated and took a number of notes. The point that Li Bin started with on nuclear terminology I thought was very, very interesting. Nuclear terms, security and safety being the same in Chinese. That's common for a number of languages and we've confronted it over the years working on threat reduction programs with countries where they don't distinguish between nuclear safety and nuclear security oftentimes the same groups of people are working. So it is a common problem around the world that we have had to confront and I very much welcome him drawing attention to the really significant differences that different approaches to terminology can bring and that need to be teased out through discussion and debate. And if I may, I know our P5 government community has taken a lot of criticism for emphasizing and really in the last several years focusing in on the production of a nuclear glossary. And people have said, oh, this is kind of a time-wasting exercise. You haven't done anything here, but I think Li Bin's comments point to the importance as a kind of threshold matter of gaining an understanding of the similarities and the differences in uses of technology in this important area and only then can you get into more of a deep and sophisticated serious discussion of nuclear doctrine and strategy. So I wanted to give a shout out right at the beginning not only to Li Bin for his highlighting this point but also to the Chinese government which actually took the lead in the glossary project inside the P5 and has been driving it forward over the last couple of years because I do think it is very important. It is, as I said, both a threshold through which you get, you pass to get to more serious discussions of doctrine and strategy but to my mind it's also a critical foundation stone and you really have to have those kinds of discussions first and that understanding is very, very important. Now to come back to the main topic regarding our interactions with the Chinese on nuclear policy, the 2010 nuclear posture review, the NPR tasked the government community to pursue high-level bilateral dialogues on strategic stability with both China and Russia aimed at fostering more stable, resilient and transparent relationships. But what does that mean? Strategic stability is a term we use a lot but one that is difficult to define and particularly when you are talking about the China and Asia Pacific regions, those particular environments. During the Cold War many associated the term stability with what we call mutual assured destruction, the notion that the incentive to initiate nuclear use would be discouraged by fear of suffering unacceptable retaliatory damage. But this characterization of strategic stability is ill-suited and too narrow to fully capture the strategic dynamic between the United States and China today. In today's world strategic stability must account for more than just the relative balance of nuclear weapons and include other capabilities that can affect stability such as cyber weapons, conventional prompt global strike and missile defenses and already Ben has mentioned several of these phenomena. Strategic stability must also include an understanding of the non-military elements that undergird the U.S.-China relationship that has elements of both cooperation and competition and hear the point about economics being an important factor also must be taken into account. So I thank Evan for bringing that to our attention this morning. So a discussion on strategic stability with China must account for the very different nature of the relationship between the U.S. and China different to what was the relationship between the USSR and the United States during the Cold War. Figuring out what strategic stability between the U.S. and China means is an ongoing process that involves U.S. and Chinese experts both in and out of government. As a government policymaker, I can tell you what strategic stability is not about in this context. We do not seek in these discussions to gain detailed insight into the operation's disposition or location of China's nuclear forces. Rather, we'd like to have a conversation about nuclear policy and doctrine that enhances understanding and thereby contributes to predictability and stability by preventing strategic postures that foster ambiguity and uncertainty. Similarly, a discussion about strategic stability is also not a substitute for broader strategic discussions that address the full range of issues in which our interests overlap. Indeed, a broad strategic stability in the context described in the nuclear posture review would serve to underpin, I would say, broader bilateral discussions by reducing the likelihood of inadvertent escalation, misperception, or miscalculation in particular during times of tension or crisis. Developing this common understanding of strategic stability is important because it will help us to manage risks across the full range of strategic issues and for the U.S. provide a better understanding of China's threat perceptions and the role played by nuclear weapons in Chinese security strategy. But I would say that we now have a more urgent issue to address because of China's long-term and comprehensive military modernization, which includes, of course, its nuclear forces. So for that reason, we are very keen to intensify our discussions in this regard, intensify its substantive heft, and really dig down deep on some of these topics. I'll just mention a few settings in which these discussions occur. Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken shares this strategic security dialogue which explores nuclear space, maritime cyber, and missile defense policy. In addition, I chair a security dialogue with China's Foreign Ministry that addresses many of these issues as well as arms control, mom proliferation, and disarmament matters. And I'm happy to note that the next meeting in this series is happening next week on May 12th and very much looking forward to those discussions. To wrap up, I'll just say a word once again about the P5 process. I introduced it right at the outset talking about the Glossary Project, but we are now seeking to enhance and enrich among the P5 the nuclear doctrine discussions. We are looking to do that in two ways. One is, again, re-intensifying discussions among National Academies of Science, the United States National Academy of Sciences through its Committee on International Security and Arms Control, and the Chinese Scientist Group have for many years now had very rich discussions of this matter. We would like to expand it to include all members of the P5 from the directions of their scientist communities. Some have National Academies on the model of ours, others do not. So there are some complexities there to be worked out, but we see a role for that kind of scientist-to-scientist discussion. It's been so valuable in the U.S.-China realm and also in the U.S.-Russia realm over many, many years that we would like to expand it to the P5 as a whole. But also we are interested in P5 discussions per se on nuclear doctrine and strategy that get to a more intense level, a more serious and sophisticated one than we accomplished up to this point. But I see that being a goal for this coming year of work in 2016. So with that, I will wrap up and I look forward to our discussion. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Rose. That was an excellent, fascinating discussion of the U.S. approach to strategic thinking. So, some full disclosure. I am not a China expert. I am a nuclear policy expert desperately working to gain a minor in U.S.-Chinese strategic relations. So, I'm not going to comment directly on the accuracy of Lee Bin's characterization, but I will point out one thing, building on something that rose at first of all to a wonderful article and if you haven't read it, you ought to read it. And it's an important article. It is, in my view however, an important article because with the greatest of respect to Rose, it's not clear to the outside observer that the depth of discussion in Lee Bin's 10-minute presentation is matched by the depth and quality of the discussion in our official dialogue. And a number of us look forward to the time when we can have our two governments begin that dialogue and I think academic discussions and Dr. Lee and I are involved in some of these and I'm involved in some of the things that Rose mentioned about the National Academy of Science are a substitute, but we ought not to misplace the fact that we need some time to have in-depth discussions so that we can understand each other because China, unlike the other members of the P5, has a quite different conceptual basis for thinking about nuclear policy as Lee Bin suggested. Some of you will say, why did we spend time talking about terms? And I would argue terms matter. Let me give you a very concrete example. Security safety. I used to be part of the National Nuclear Security Administration. It was our goal and we would have been willing to share a lot of U.S. knowledge to improve the security of Chinese nuclear weapons. A variety of reasons those dialogues didn't happen, but we would have been ready as we were ready and have shared knowledge of security of nuclear weapons with other states. Had anybody suggested that we share safety information about nuclear weapons, people would have first spoken of the Atomic Energy Act, then taken away my security clearance, and then put me in jail. And so understanding that this enormously important distinction to us doesn't even exist in the Chinese language is important. So don't undervalue the linguistic aspects. I would push back on one thing that Lee Bin said. I think his intellectual discussion of deterrence and components was interesting and thoughtful and largely irrelevant because it is a fact of the last 70 years that the risk of conflict between nuclear armed states is such that we don't have conventional attacks on nuclear armed states. So whether or not a conventional attack, depending on your nuclear capability to deter response, is, compelence or deterrence is theoretically interesting, but it's not practical. And the historical evidence is that non-nuclear armed states are perfectly willing to attack nuclear armed states. Vietnam and China, Argentina and Britain, China and the United States and Korea when China was not a nuclear armed state. So I don't know that this deterrence, compelence and distinction is quite as important as it may seem. The second thing where I would push back, and this is clearer in the article than it was in what Lee Bin had time to say, is this question of strategic stability. In the article it suggested that Chinese scholars are coming to use the U.S. traditional definition of strategic stability. And I'll simply say that has not been my experience in dialogue with them. Quite to the contrary, the narrow definition. Rose pointed out one of the dangers that strategic stability risks becoming a synonym for overall foreign policy. But if you take a narrower definition, focusing on prevention of nuclear war, it is unclear that the Chinese see that any of the strategic stability thinking in the United States built up between equals is relevant to a discussion between there. I think this is an important thing. I am on the public record as saying that the term strategic stability has outlived its usefulness in dialogue with China. And while we ought to have a dialogue that will lead to what I call strategic stability, it's not worth the effort to work on that term, but alternate views are possible. One of the things that was stressed in the article and stressed a little bit in the presentation is a question of transparency. Transparency got hijacked by an erroneous belief that this administration and the previous administration wanted to know where are your forces and what time are they there, and can I make sure my GPS targeting coordinates are correctly set, and that was never for either of the last two administrations. What we wanted to understand is exactly what the article was about. How do the Chinese think about nuclear weapons? I want to invite your attention to an important thing in the article that suggests that sometimes this transparency comes through the press. That Chinese get asked a question and the answer shows up in the press. We don't tend to think of that as an authoritative way because our press is somewhat chaotic. That's a strength, but for this purpose it is nothing. On the other hand, the Chinese press, at least some of it, is more responsive to its government's desires. I think we need to pay a lot of attention to looking at what the Chinese government chooses to put out publicly as a way to look at transparency. There are a lot of areas in which transparency would actually help us because it would avoid overreaction. The technical lagging in the term, the idea that being inferior in science and technology is a serious challenge, quite naturally causes China to investigate lots of things. Knowing only that they are investigating those things is consistent with technical lagging, consistent with those who have been waiting for the great Chinese build-up sprint to parity. If we had more transparency on what we were doing, that might help. Other areas where greater transparency might help is China's investment in sea-based strategic deterrent, whose relationship with what is now called the PLA Strategic Rocket Forces is not clear, at least to me. The actual purpose of the SSBN program is not clear, at least to me. A discussion of how we both think about that would be an important area for transparency, as would a discussion about how we both think about the regional role. Finally, in talking about arms race, I want to make a point. All discussions about arms race look at the United States and another country. What they fail to account for is the unique extended deterrence role of the United States. That leads many of us to believe that second to none is an important policy, not because the difference between 1500 and 1000 has any meaning in a large-scale nuclear war, but because it may have meaning to some of our allies in whether or not we're reliable. So I would urge my Chinese colleagues, as I have in other fora, that seeking to prevent hegemony is not the same thing as seeking hegemony. The United States' traditional position for most of the last 30 years, at least, has not been to seek superiority so it can gain hegemony, but it has been to seek some kind of equivalence. We change the buzzword administration by administration. What the idea is to make sure that, particularly, our allies are not under any illusion that we're an unreliable protector. That's all the fence. We have jointly walked ourselves into a corner where we will get the worst of both worlds. The Chinese reaction in the belief that we have deployed missile defense to threaten Chinese forces without a middle-level defense that actually would be particularly useful for that does seem to me that some of the ideas that we have suggested for discussion with the Russians on missile defense would be entirely suitable for China. Were we to have this rich government-level dialogue that I am advocating? But nothing I say suggests that this isn't a very valuable and important article and that you should look at it for how we can find ways to have a discussion. The understanding of concepts is the first level. I think that's the important strategic discussion to have. Some of us have been working on that for a while and some of us will continue to. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think it's pretty clear that you have a minor in U.S.-China strategic studies, so I would highly recommend that you begin looking at a double major because you're pretty close. So what I'd like to do now is I'm going to ask questions of each of the presenters just to get all of our intellectual juices flowing. I ask the presenters to try and be brief and then we're going to open it up for Q&A and hopefully we'll have about 30 minutes for that. So to leave in, my question for you would be, given what you argue in the article, do you believe U.S. and Chinese views are converging? In other words, clearly Rose and Linton understand the arguments you make in the article. Do you think that the communication gap between the U.S. and China are closing? And if so, why do you think, and here I'm asking for purely your personal view, why is the Chinese government, especially the PLA, so reluctant to having this dialogue? I mean, I worked on U.S.-China relations for six years at the NSC. And I was in every possible, almost every possible high-level meeting, the small meetings, the super small meetings, the meetings we don't even admit existed, and very difficult to have a serious discussion about nuclear issues. Why is that? Again, your personal view. Rose, it'd be great to hear from you a little bit more about how the administration thinks about missile defense in the U.S.-China context because that's in the headlines these days, especially with the U.S.-ROK decision to begin consultations about deployment of that. And then Linton, could you tell us a little bit more about why you think strategic stability is not the right focus for the U.S.-China dialogue, assuming it ever happens in a track one format? I remember when I was involved in these discussions, we would talk about arms race stability and crisis stability as two components of strategic stability. Is it that those are the wrong concepts, or is it that the U.S.-China relationship isn't up to the point of having those conversations? I just want to draw you out a little bit about what aspects of strategic stability you don't think are the right conversation. Then, of course, what is the right conversation? You talked about transparency a little bit, but as you know, the Chinese are very reluctant to have a conversation about transparency related to capabilities. So where should we take the transparency conversation given those constraints? So, Li Ben, why don't we start with you? Thank you. I personally very much like to see meter-a to meter-a dialogues between all the two countries. I committed to my PLA colleagues many times. If they want to train their experts for such kind of nuclear dialogues, we like to pretend to be the routine to have them. But unfortunately, we have not seen that yet. I don't think that this is because the positions of our two countries are so much different. That is not the main problem. The main problem is that we see in China and we see in the United States there are no consensus. In the United States, some people like to see nuclear dialogue with China, but some other people try to stop that. For example, Rose always helps me and some other Chinese nuclear experts to get US visa to come to the United States to have dialogue. But some other people try to stop that. And in China, some people, they like to have dialogues, nuclear dialogues in the United States. Some others would say, look, they always want to get to know what we are thinking about. They never tell us what they are thinking about. So we should stay away from them. So in both countries, we need some minimum level consensus, domestic consensus. That is most important. I'd like to make a larger conceptual comment about missile defense in the US-China context because it is the kind of discussion. I would like to have with China about this matter clearly. And Linton was very astute in commenting if we were to build a missile defense system to undermine the Chinese offensive nuclear deterrent. We'd go about it in a much different way than putting a sad system and some limited capabilities to deal with regional missile defense missions. Against regional threats. And I do want to stress again this capability is extremely limited, but we need to be able to make the case more clearly. And I think that does include with some convincing measures to convey that difference to our Chinese colleagues. But when I think about the conversation we need to have about missile defense, it is in the context of the proliferation of intermediate range ballistic missiles in Eurasia. You know we've been grappling with this matter with the Russian Federation. Their violation of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which is a total bilateral ban on INF range systems between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. That are ground based. And we believe that the Russians have tested a very capable glickum that has been flown to those ranges, banned by the treaty. This is a problem that the Russians say themselves is across Eurasia. And it's been put about as the public rationale for why they proceeded down this road. And President Putin himself spoke about this when he went to Crimea in August of 2014. He talked about the general problem of intermediate range missile proliferation across Eurasia as being a problem that the Russians are grappling with. I say yes, we are grappling with a similar problem. It's a limited intermediate range missile threat, short an intermediate range missile threat. And we have chosen to respond to that limited threat from Iran, from North Korea, by deploying limited missile defenses. Full stop. We are not eager to get into developing offensive capabilities that first of all would not comply with the ban on INF systems that we have with the Russian Federation. We don't want to build and deploy our own INF range missiles as it would violate the INF treaty to which we are committed. But also we feel we can tackle this problem with a limited missile defense system. So it's a way to think and talk about the proliferation of INF range missiles across Eurasia that is a discussion well worth having. And one that I think we should pursue generally with countries in Eurasia and not simply in the US-China context, but it is a general issue. Oh, why don't I like strategic stability? I like strategic stability. It just doesn't like you. I just think that the term and the definition of the term is so elastic that it makes it hard for us to focus on the kind of discussions that I want to have with China. And make no mistake, when they write the history of the 20th century, the definitive history, it will be about the struggle against fascism and communism from the American perspective at least. When they write the history of the United States in the 21st century, it will be about how well we managed China's rise to global prominence and whether we were able to do that without war. So overall broadest term stability is a hugely important subject and the nuclear part of it is a relatively small element. But I'm a nuclear guy and I want to talk about the nuclear thing because I don't want it to become a big element and make the management of relations harder. And I have just concluded that labeling its strategic stability like labeling discussions transparency is just not useful. It is not useful to say to China, let's have a transparency discussion because it triggers a belief, erroneous, but a belief that we're trying to not share anything and gain information. So let's look at the important topics where misunderstanding could be detrimental to both sides and have a discussion about that. And I don't care the late Bob Linnhart, who there are a handful of people in this room old enough to remember, used to say call it banana. Let's just talk about it. Great. Wonderful. Let's see it looks like we have just about 30 minutes for Q's and A's. So why don't folks put up their hands and I'll start choosing them and we can go from there. So what don't we start with this gentleman right here in the front. Yeah, what's the. Yeah, great. We just asked that you introduce yourself in your affiliation before asking the question. Thank you. I just like to ask Professor Lee a question and building on Mr Brooks comment about the Chinese sea based deterrent. I'd like to add to that the the multiple warhead deterrent the Mervs and see if you have any comments about why China is developing Mervs and the sea based deterrent. Thank you. And I'm Ben Lawson and I'm a blogger with the diplomat. The the sea based nuclear force. It is simple. I think that there are two ideas behind why is that China want to understand the technology. First, second, China want to have a credible nuclear deterrence. And the sea based nuclear force would add some credit to China's nuclear deterrence. So that's about sea based force for Mervs. I'm not sure. I don't believe that China has deployed the moves, but there's some calculations behind. I do not want my country to deploy moves. The reason is that, you know, if China deploy Mervs and China would be in a more dangerous situation and China would face a situation of use or lose them. But my guess is that China want to understand the technology. First, second, I believe that China has developed missile defense countermeasures. And one of those countermeasures is deploying decoys. Some people call decoys as multiple warheads, but they are not. So actually, you know, on one missile, there's one real warhead and many decoys. That does not change its strategic stability. So this is my comment on your question. Great. Thank you. We'll take the right back there in the corner. Thank you. This is Yang, visiting fellow from Carnegie. And my question is to those two American panelists, assume this kind of nuclear dialogue is some kind of mutual learning process. And Chinese and American side also tries to make some distinction between foreign security threat and foreign security challenges. So I wonder how will America respond to these two different, respond to these two in different way? And in what kind of condition will you think that security challenge would transform into security threat? Thank you. Bruce Linton, over to you. Well, I'm having a bit of a hard time grasping the question that if I may, let me just say a few words about how we thought about these issues and the value of these discussions during the Cold War with the USSR. And it was a cumulative process of developing understanding on both sides, I would say. It was, again, I come back to the word, I like to stress the word mutual predictability as being a net benefit to ability, strategic stability or stability period. I think I'll just say stability period. And so over time, although there was, I think, some body of concern shared between the thinking in Beijing today and the thinking in Moscow back in the 1960s and the 1970s. And we really began to pick up pace in terms of these kinds of discussions in the 1980s, that those concerns were dispelled over time by the benefits that accrue, particularly in the arena of mutual predictability. And over time that also led to assuaging concerns, although, you know, two countries like Russia and the United States have large numbers of nuclear arm missiles pointed at each other. You're never going to assuage the security concern completely. But at least there became, I think, an understanding over time that there is a stability in the deterrent relationship between the two sides that was, to a certain extent, reassuring about the challenges that we faced from the USSR and the Russian Federation. Again, particularly not only on the nuclear front, but in terms of the alliance relationships overall. So it's a rather imperfect answer to your question, but I think my bottom line is that there is, I think, a, being a reassurance, there's a reassuring aspect to the history here of how the U.S. and U.S.S. were able to gain a good measure of mutual understanding and predictability over time through such discussions. Of course, we also got into major nuclear disarmament efforts beginning in the 1980s and stretching into the 90s and to the present day. That's a whole different topic that we are not talking about in this particular thing. But the other aspect I would say is that there was a relationship between our understanding on the nuclear front and our understanding, again, of the conventional standoff in the alliance relationships, both in Europe, but also in Asia as well with regard to Russia. So, please. So, Rose correctly points out that transparency leads to predictability and predictability leads to stability, no matter how you define stability, that's true. So how does that play in to this distinction between security challenges and security threats? It plays into it by helping the United States to distinguish between what China is doing to make sure it is maintaining its technological capability and what China is doing for other reasons. It is a feature of American society and the best example is the George W. Bush administration in which I serve, that if you don't tell people what your plans are, they will make it up, alright? Everybody in this room believes that we were developing low yield nuclear weapons in the Bush administration. Apparently done at the Department of Agriculture because I was running the nuclear weapons program and I wasn't doing it. But we didn't ever counter the narrative. So here's an example. China wants to understand submarine technology. And it has deployed the Gen Class Type 094. But right now, that's a system that has no strategic rationale against the United States because it can't reach the United States except for areas in which I used to drive submarines for a living. It would be vulnerable. But it would be a marvelous weapon for coercing Japan into saying, no, you cannot allow US ships to port call in the case of a Taiwan contingency. So now I sit here, I have a perfectly internally consistent explanation for what China is doing. I was almost certainly wrong. But absent a discussion about how China is thinking about these, I'm going to, I'm going to believe that. Or the version of me that is in the government is going to believe it. Because you sort of pay those of us who are in the government to look out for the possibility of threats and do something about it. And so Li Bin's security challenge unexplained becomes my security threat. And that is, I think, the linkage between the two, why the distinction is so important, and yet another reason why some in depth dialogue between people with authority within their governments is in the interest of both countries. I noticed that when the question about security challenges, security threat came out, our two American colleagues feel, what's that? You think about this. When the American, for example, in the 1980s, the Americans asked Chinese scientists, who is your national security threat when you develop your missile defense technology? The Chinese scientists would have the same reaction. What that? What is national security threat? Because at that time, China and the United States were friends. The Chinese missile defense program was aimed to understand missile defense technology rather than counter any specific threat. So this is a very good example of how we have problems in our communication. And a very short response to Linton's point that China's nuclear submarine is good for coercing Japan. My response is that if China wanted to use this for nuclear deterrence vis-a-vis the United States, China has to go step by step to extend the range. China cannot jump from zero to 10,000 miles. I'm Hank Gaffney. I spent 54 years in defense, including three years in the U.S. Navy where I was off K-boy and Matsu in a huge U.S. fleet in 1958. But I also spent in my 28 years in the Office of Secretary of Defense almost 13 years intensively engaged in nuclear weapons. I have a question at the end here, but I just wanted to note, I've never heard in those years anybody in the U.S. government use the word components. Second, I'd never have heard in all my discussions across the years in international relations anybody talk about U.S. wanting hegemony or hegemonic rule around the world. The word just doesn't come up. And I've confirmed that with a number of people. Just a quick reflection on the neutron bomb. I was deeply involved in that. Do you know the warhead on this small eight inch round was one kiloton thousand tons of TNT? But it was an accident that we got that weapon as as Linton knows. But my real question is, and this is supposed to be provocative, how much in your work do you rely on articles about U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy? On the international relations, I are journals. And my question is, because I never found that myself of any use to me in working on the nuclear problems. Thank you very much for clarifying that the U.S. government does not use the word nuclear components and the global hedge money. I fully understand that. So in my article, I try to say U.S. states want to convince its allies that U.S. states is able to protect them. That is a way to provide global protection and to have global leadership. So that's my way. And secondly, I'm not an IR scholar by training. I'm a physicist by training. And fortunately, I have friends like Rose, like Linton. If I'm wrong, they always correct me. So I do not rely on IR journals. Edward Levine from the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation. Dr. Lee, your article is fascinating. And I second everybody's made it carefully. Two ideas that particularly impressed me are, despite the previous question, the difference between deterrence and compelence and the comment in your article that China sees nuclear weapons as militarily unusable and particularly not relevant to a conflict that begins as a conventional conflict. When I think of where those ideas might be most applicable, I am drawn to the case of the Kargil conflict between Pakistan and India, where quite clearly Pakistan viewed nuclear weapons as having the ability to deter a nuclear attack and make a conventional war more profitable for Pakistan. And I wonder if you could point us to any cases in which China has remonstrated with Pakistan regarding the usefulness of nuclear weapons and the implications, for example, of giving tactical commanders control over nuclear weapons. Thank you. Thank you very much for your comment and the question. I believe that my government and the Pakistani government have nuclear dialogue. Unfortunately, I'm not part of that, but I personally visited Pakistan a few years ago. I gave a couple talks there in Islamabad and tried to convince them that tactical nuclear weapons are not useful. I did not know to what extent they would agree with me, but what I have seen is that they still like me, so that's good. And some Pakistani students want to come to China to work with me. That's very good. And I have sent one of my students to Pakistan to understand their idea about the roles of nuclear weapons. And he has a very interesting finding. That is today, some Americans, they believe that technical nuclear weapons are useful. Some Pakistani experts believe that technical nuclear weapons are useful. Some Japanese believe that technical nuclear weapons are important. You could see that they are so about a way, but they share the same concept. So this is something we should pay attention to. So thank you very much for your question and you gave me a chance to mention this. Yeah, I want to push back on a word that you used. We used the term tactical nuclear weapons. That's the empty set. All nuclear weapons use is strategic. That wasn't always true. You can go back in to the 60s and it was meaningful to talk about, but strategic by definition alters the overall conflict. And any use of nuclear weapons, whether it's a success or not, will alter the overall conflict in huge ways. And so this non-strategic nuclear weapons category that we invented for convenience in arms control is not aiding in intelligent thought because it leads us to believe that there is some nuclear weapons use that is somehow okay. And that's not right. For at least one reason that nobody has any idea what happens after that because we have zero experience in escalation management after nuclear use and lots of experience in escalation that knows that I wanted actually happening. So I would really urge Ben started out with his comments about the importance of terms. Here's a term that the United States uses all the time that leads to misunderstanding in other states. And if you all wanted to just band together and abolish it, that would be a good thing. Greg Tillman, Arms Control Association. My question is what role do Russian nuclear weapons and Indian nuclear weapons play in China's thinking about its needs for its own force? China has, China always, let me begin with this. My two American colleagues explained their ideas about the strategic stability. Let me explain my definition about what is strategic stability. Strategic stability means no incentive to use nuclear weapons first. No incentive to have nuclear arms race. I think the two definitions are the original definitions starting from the 1960s. And today I believe that we should adhere to these definitions. The differences are about what approach should be most important. In the Cold War, the approach was about the nuclear force structures. And people wanted to have good force structures, so neither side would have incentive to launch a nuclear weapon first. Today I believe that is still useful. This is why I do not want China to deploy more. I do not want the United States to deploy missile defense. But Rose and Linton both emphasized the importance of transparency, confidence-building measures. I agree. They are important to reduce the incentives of arms race and nuclear weapon use. But I like to add one more approach. That is to commit no force use. If you commit no force use, you would have to shave your nuclear force according to your no force use commitment. And you would have to send signals to your rivals that you would not use nuclear weapons first. For your question, China and Russia have a bilateral agreement on no force use. And China and India both have universal no force use commitment. So in our relation with India, with Russia, we try to remove the influence of nuclear weapons. We try not to exercise the influences of nuclear weapons. I believe that is the nature of our nuclear relations with India and with Russia. That does not suggest that we have good relations with the two countries. It suggests that even if we have problems, we do not want nuclear inferences to matter in our relations. My name is Han Ping. I'm from Tecro. I would just like to make a quick comment regarding Mr Lee's remark on US arms sales to Taiwan. Well, the US arms sales to Taiwan is conducted according to the Taiwan Relations Act. And this act was enacted by the US Congress in 1979 with an aim to help maintain stability, security, and in the Western Pacific. Thank you very much. Okay, I think we've got time for one more question. My name is Walt Slocum. I used to work in the Defense Department, but not nearly as long as Hank Gaffney. And for this audience, I feel compelled to emphasize that it's Hank Gaffney and not Frank Gaffney. My question relates to no force use. No relation. I think they're not relations. They have no intellectual relationship, whatever. I guess my question about no first use is what does it mean? Is it an absolute commitment that there is no conceivable circumstance in which a country would use nuclear weapons other than a nuclear attack on itself bearing in mind that things can get very bad? By the way, I think the idea that Pakistan doesn't regard nuclear weapons as a backstop against Indian attack is not consistent with the history of Pakistan and India. But the central question is by the no first use policy, do you mean an absolute irrevocable commitment never to use nuclear weapons except in the context of a nuclear attack? Who would like to start? Apparently, I'm not the right person to explain the position of my country, but my belief is the same as you just said. I want to emphasize another side. We should know that no force use includes two parts. One part is what you just said. The other part is not to threaten to use nuclear weapons first. That part is very important. If you do not threaten to use nuclear weapons, then you will significantly reduce the roles of nuclear weapons. So that is the way we promote nuclear disarmament globally. I want to go back to something I said earlier. There's a fundamental difference between China's security situation and the U.S., and that is the existence of alliance. My Chinese colleagues often say, why won't you accept no first use? I'll tell you why. Because the minute we say no first use, a number of states that don't have nuclear weapons now because they depend on the American umbrella will reconsider that. I know China doesn't believe it's a threat to South Korea, but I don't know that South Korea believes that. I know China doesn't intend to threaten Japan, but I'm positive Japan isn't convinced of that. Both of those are countries which are technologically capable of developing nuclear weapons. So I understand the community that thinks no first use is a wonderful tool of countering proliferation. And the only problem with that is that it's wrong. In fact, U.S. no first use on the alliance system won't stop proliferation and it may increase it. The question of what no first use means is only one of the problems. I very seldom quote the Russian Federation on nuclear things as an example to follow. But setting aside whether it's their real policy, the policy expressed in the December 2014 military doctrine that nuclear weapons use is appropriate for conventional conflicts where the very survival of the state is at issue does not seem to me to be a bad policy. We would add the very survival of the state or of our alliance partners that we are obligated to defend. I also make the standard argument, whatever the matter, I believe the Chinese no first use policy. Not all of my colleagues do, but I believe it. But it is factually true that states have gone in and out of that policy in the blink of an eye before the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. And so it seems to me to be a thin reed to hang long term stability on. Rose, did you want to come in? Yeah, I'd just like to add one point. I wanted to make a point about alliance relationships, but Luton's very ably done that. The other point I'd really like to underscore is that we debated this matter long and hard during the nuclear posture review, which I referenced at the beginning in my remarks. And it is a matter that people in our government take extremely seriously. And I know it has been for multiple administrations, whether Republican or Democratic, they have grappled hard with this issue. That is why we ended up with a formulation only in extreme circumstances. That means something to us. It means something to our president. It means something to our planners. But in addition to the alliance factor that Luton pointed to, there's also a factor that for a long time has been grappled with that is relating to the deterrence of other weapons of mass destruction use. And so again, you can argue with this, whether it's a good idea or not, whether to sustain at least the potential for nuclear use to respond to a biological attack, for example. But this is another factor that has featured heavily in U.S. official thinking on this matter. But it is one among many issues in the nuclear realm that this government takes very seriously. And I know it will be debated again in the next administration when the next nuclear posture review is taken forward. So thank you. Thank you. Well, clearly today we've all been treated to an exceptionally interesting conversation. Conversation that can only happen at a global think tank like Carnegie, where you have China specialists like Li Bin that reside in both the United States and China. We have colleagues like Rose and Linton who go in and out of government that allow us to get at some of the core issues at the heart of strategic stability in U.S.-China relations. So please join me in thanking them. Thank you.