Others say

Danger next door

China is becoming more assertive abroad, taking aggressive measures to enforce its broad maritime claims, founding a new $100 billion Asian infrastructure investment bank, and boosting its defense spending year after year. While this could be worrisome, there is one way in which China's rising power could be useful: to curb the expanding nuclear arsenal of its neighbor and longtime client state, North Korea.

In years past, Chinese experts were skeptical of North Korea's nuclear weapons capabilities. Now that is changing. In February, Chinese experts made a surprising statement at a closed-door meeting with U.S. experts at the China Institute of International Studies, the foreign ministry's think tank, according to an account in the Wall Street Journal. The occasion was a non-official discussion of U.S.-China security issues. The Chinese asserted that they believe North Korea now has 20 nuclear warheads and the capability to produce enough weapons-grade uranium to double that arsenal by next year, the newspaper said.

A key technical issue is how much fissile material North Korea has and how much it can generate with indigenous technology. In addition to plutonium, North Korea has pursued a second path to the bomb, using uranium enriched in centrifuges.

The United States for years has held out the hope that China would press North Korea to become more responsible. China never exactly says no, but in the end its reluctance to destabilize the North Korean regime seems to trump any anxiety it might feel about its neighbor's nuclear capability, let alone that regime's execrable treatment of its own people.

Could Beijing recalculate? China has shown signs of exasperation with North Korea's enigmatic leader, Kim Jong Un, and if China possesses about 250 nuclear weapons, then its leaders should be unsettled to hear from their own experts that North Korea is ramping up to 50 or even 100 in the next decade. Certainly, China--and only China--has the leverage to halt North Korea's steady climb to becoming a nuclear power.

Editorial on 05/12/2015

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