This report reviews Chinese participation in the international negotiations for a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) at the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva and provides background for China’s decision-making procedures during the negotiations.

The CTBT negotiations marked the first important international negotiations for a multilateral disarmament treaty in which China participated from beginning to end. They were the first important international negotiations in which China, as a nuclear power, had great influence. The Chinese delegation to the CD assumed a serious and responsible attitude during the entire course of the negotiations. In part to increase international confidence that it would sign the CTBT by 1996 as scheduled and in part to indicate its intent to adapt itself to the world trend toward increased international cooperation and nuclear arms reduction, China announced during the latter stage of the negotiations that it would suspend nuclear testing.

As an example of successful multilateral negotiations, the conclusion and signing of the treaty, although long postponed, is an important achievement in arms control. As the sole declared nuclear-weapon state of the Third World at that time and the last among the five nuclear-weapon states (P5) to cease nuclear testing, China’s stance toward the CTBT negotiations was the object of world attention and concern. The population of China accounts for nearly one-quarter of the world’s total; China’s positive position on the CTBT and its contributions toward this end has a major worldwide impact now and in the future.

Prior to the commencement of the CTBT negotiations in Geneva, China declared on October 5, 1993, that while supporting an early conclusion of the treaty it would “take an active part in the negotiating process and work together with other countries to conclude this treaty no later than 1996.” China kept its promise.

China pursued a fair, reasonable, and verifiable treaty with universal adherence and unlimited duration. During the negotiations, China presented many working papers, non-papers, and suggestions regarding the CTBT draft text (including a number of revisions), and dealt with a series of critical issues in the Preamble, Basic Obligations, Organization, Verification, and Entry into Force sections of the treaty. The Chinese delegation played an active role at the conference table, and contributed positively to the weekly P5 consultations that ran in parallel with the CTBT talks.

China adhered toughly to its positions on two issues in the latter stage of the CTBT negotiations. One concerned potential abuses of the on-site inspection procedures. The other was that all nuclear-test-capable states (assumed to be the P5, India, Israel, and Pakistan) must accede to the treaty in order for it to enter into full legal force. Although China was not entirely satisfied with the final draft CTBT, it accepted the treaty. It agreed to sign the CTBT in the belief that the treaty text represented the best achievable result of the negotiations of the preceding two and a half years, reflected by and large the state of the negotiations, and was in general balanced.

Signing the CTBT was in line with China’s consistent stand in support of “the complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons.” This was one of the major reasons China supported an early conclusion of the treaty. Of course, China’s desire to meet the trend of the modern world also motivated it to sign. Because economic development had long been Beijing’s top priority, China needed a peaceful security environment in order to devote itself completely to the modernization of the nation. To this end, its defense buildup had been steadily subordinated to national economic development. Beijing’s decision on the CTBT negotiations stemmed also from its self-defense and no-first-use nuclear policies. China had established an effective nuclear force for self-defense.

China is now making preparations for the treaty to enter into force. After the conclusion of the CTBT, China will continue efforts in pursuit of world peace, development, and cooperation. Meanwhile, China will continuously ensure the safety and reliability of its nuclear weapons without nuclear testing.

The development of "information warfare" presents international legal issues that will complicate nations' efforts both to execute and to respond to certain information warfare attacks, specifically those using computers, telecommunications, or networks to attack adversary information systems. Some legal constraints will certainly apply to information warfare, either because the constraints explicitly regulate particular actions, or because more general principles of international law govern the effects of those actions. Nevertheless, the novelty of certain information warfare techniques may remove them from application of established legal categories. Furthermore, the ability of signals to travel across international networks, and affect systems in distant countries, conflicts with the long-standing principle of national, territorial sovereignty.

During the Cold War, the United States carried out a number of covert actions against elected governments in the Third World. Critics of the "democratic peace" suggest these covert operations are potential invalidations of, or at least exceptions to, the proposition that liberal democracies rarely or never wage war on one another. Democratic peace theorists, however, argue that the targets of these covert actions were not long-term, stable democracies, that covert action falls short of interstate war by Correlates of War (CoW) criteria, and that the covert nature of these operations meant that liberal norms and institutions in the United States did not have an opportunity to function. Even so, by forcing the executive to use covert means, democratic institutions may have prevented the higher level of international violence known as war, although they were not robust enough to prevent covert action. Liberal interventionist and anti-communist ideology provided policymakers with a justificatory frame for intervention which, however, did not amount to war between democracies.

Nuclear war is generally believed to bring risks of destruction out of proportion to any gain that may be secured by the war, or to any loss that may be averted, except perhaps for the loss of national independence and group survival. Nuclear-armed states, however, continue to project military force outside their own territory in order to carry out rivalries for power and influence. Will these rival power projections lead to war, as they often did in the past? If not, how will they be resolved? This paper makes the case that, because of the recognized destructiveness of nuclear weapons, rivalries among major nuclear-armed states for power and influence outside their own territory are not likely to lead to central war among them, but that definite lines separating zones of exclusive security influence, such as prevailed during the Cold War, will reappear where circumstances prevent
other compromises. This conclusion does not hold in the case of nuclear powers that are centrally vulnerable to conventional attack from each other: in that case, nuclear deterrence is less likely to be stable. Where lines are established, they may facilitate rather than prevent cooperation in dealing with the next century's global problems.

The tasks of preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention are neither self-evident nor value-neutral, as some of their proponents seem to believe. Diplomacy that aims to resolve long-standing conflicts may have to take sides and coerce powerful parties into concessions. Diplomacy that aims to manage conflict so that it does not become violent may have to sacrifice a quest for justice in deference to the powerful. Prevention might conflict with important national and even global interests. If, as President Clinton has suggested many times, the primary American interest in Bosnia is thwarting the spread of the war, then the arms embargo has been an unqualified success. If, however, the primary American and global interest has been denying Serbian aggression and upholding the principle of Bosnian sovereignty, then the embargo has failed.

A focus on prevention ignores the role that conflict plays in driving political change in societies. For grievances to be redressed, they must be vocalized. If they are vocalized, those with a stake in the status quo will attempt to suppress them. Often the balance of change depends on the ability of the grieved to amplify the conflict to increase their support. If we have learned anything from the disparate cases of conflict resolution in recent decades -- the civil rights movement in the United States, the fight for human rights in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fight for national self-determination in the Middle East, the fight against apartheid in South Africa -- it is that some conflicts must be intensified before they are resolved.

Preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention do not lessen the difficulty of choices for leaders, nor do they really lessen costs. For either to succeed, policymakers must still spell out their interests, set priorities among cases, and balance goals with resources. The president will still need to educate the American people about the rationale behind a policy and convince them of the need for action. Absent well-defined interests, clear goals, and prudent judgment about acceptable costs and risks, policies of preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention simply mean that one founders early in a crisis instead of later.

A solution to the nuclear dilemma has eluded mankind since the creation of nuclear weapons.  A visionary attempt by the United States to eliminate the threat at the beginning of the nuclear age (the "Baruch Plan" for the international control of atomic energy) fell victim to the Cold War.  However, in this new geopolitical era, the UN Security Council finally has the opportunity to function as its founders intended, and it may now be appropriate to reconsider the idea of a security regime that would bring all nuclear weapons under international control.

The internationalization of nuclear security would have to be implemented over a number of years through a systematic step-by-step process.  This paper suggests the following three-phase approach: in Phase I, a new international security regime would be established; in Phase II, a UN-owned international nuclear deterrent force (INDF) would be created; and finally, in Phase III, all national nuclear arsenals would be eliminated in favor of the INDF.

This paper examines technical and institutional possibilities for improving the ability of the international safeguards regime to prevent or slow the spread of nuclear weapons. It relies strongly on the experience of the recently uncovered Iraqi nuclear-weapons program and the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United Nations in the discovery of the program's extent and scope.

The Iraqi program and its exposure following the Gulf War surprised and disturbed much of the international community. However, the shock generated by the extent and the size of an effort that had been suspected but remained grossly underestimated and misunderstood has given a strong political impetus to the will of the international community for strengthening the non-proliferation regime.

This paper makes a number of suggestions based on a review of the Iraqi effort and on an assessment of possible future attempts by other nations to acquire nuclear weapons.

Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) has undertaken a project to work with elements of the Soviet defense industry to help them convert production from military to civilian uses. In this project we refer to conversion as the use of defense industry facilities, personnel, and/or technology for the production of nondefense products and services. One aspect of this work is to facilitate cooperation between U.S. and Soviet companies. Representative Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), asked the Center to initiate this project. The Institute of U.S.A. and Canada Studies (ISKAN) of the Soviet Academy of Sciences is coordinating the Soviet Union's participation.

In recent years issues in international security have been increasingly influenced by economic factors. This is evident in the defense budgets of the major powers as well as in arms transfers to regions such as the Middle East. Furthermore, arms control has taken on a broader meaning, involving unilateral cuts and confidence-building measures to supplement negotiated structural arms-control agreements.

The principal objective of this project is to assist the Soviet defense industry in their defense conversion activities by:

• Analyzing the conversion problem in the Soviet Union and, if appropriate, extracting lessons from the U.S. experience.
• Assisting the Soviets in contacting and exploring cooperative ventures with appropriate U.S. companies.
• Stimulating discussions among Soviet defense experts and U.S. government officials and academics on appropriate changes to trade policy.

Continued sales of ballistic missiles to countries in the Middle East and South Asia have intensified international interest in China's advanced weapons. Proposals for halting these sales can succeed when the dynamics and motivations of China's defense system are taken fully into account. We have noted in an earlier article in this journal that the technologies, strategies and goals relating to Beijing's missile programs must be better understood by the concerned international community in order to overcome its confrontational stance with China and to build a cooperative regime.