President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Wednesday in California. Talks will include trade, Taiwan, and managing fraught U.S.-Chinese relations.
The announcement comes as a new Pentagon report reveals a disturbing development in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) military power. Aside from expanding land, air, and sea capabilities, Beijing’s nuclear arsenal is rapidly growing.
According to U.S. intelligence, China has more than 500 nuclear warheads as of last May. That amounts to 100 more than last year, putting Beijing on pace to field more than 1,000 by 2030, a rapid expansion, that has the U.S. taking note.
“They’re becoming a great power and they don’t want to be check-mated by our nuclear forces, and they want to, therefore, be in our league,” said Brookings Institution Senior Fellow, Michael O’Hanlon.
He said China still has a ways to go before its stockpile rivals that of the U.S. or Russia. He adds that while the build-up isn’t a surprise, he does find the budding partnership between Beijing and Moscow concerning.
“We always had a framework and we assumed that it was okay for Russia and the United States to each have equal numbers of different types of weapons. And
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