WASHINGTON -- As President Clinton prepares for a summit meeting in Beijing this month, the United States and China are trying to negotiate an agreement to no longer target nuclear missiles at each other, senior U.S. officials said Saturday.
The officials also said that Washington was pressing China to codify its promises earlier this month to further restrict the supply of missile technology to Pakistan.
The Asia director of the National Security Council, Sandra Kristoff, is in Beijing trying to complete work on the substantive agenda for Clinton's visit, the first by a U.S. president to China since the crackdown on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square nine years ago this month.
Clinton is to leave Washington on June 24, and the deadline of the visit is a great spur to the negotiations. But the Chinese, by past pattern, tend to make their hardest decisions at the last moment, U.S. officials say.
The United States tried to get a mutual detargeting agreement with China before President Jiang Zemin's visit to Washington last October, the officials said. But the effort foundered on China's insistence that detargeting be coupled with a mutual pledge of no first use of nuclear weapons in any crisis.
But U.S. strategic doctrine has always rejected pledges of no first use of nuclear weapons, because they are judged essentially meaningless and unverifiable. Also, during the Cold War, there was the real concern that NATO might have to use nuclear weapons to stop a big invasion by Warsaw Pact conventional forces into Western Europe, and Soviet suggestions of no-first-use pledges were always rejected.
"We're not going to change our doctrine in the context of China," a senior U.S. official said Saturday. "There are alliance reasons in Asia not to change it, as well," the official said, referring to the reliance of Japan and Southeast Asian nations on the U.S. nuclear umbrella.
Detargeting itself, though considered part of "confidence building" between nations, is essentially symbolic, since missiles can be retargeted again in a matter of minutes, experts in nuclear weapons have said.
In a post-Cold War show of good faith, the United States and Russia have announced that they no longer have missiles targeted at each other, but both sides admit that detargeting would barely slow a nuclear exchange -- unlike the separate storage of missiles and warheads, for example, which some nonproliferation experts now advocate.
Republicans in Congress have expressed shock that China has about 13 strategic missiles targeted on the United States, according to a CIA estimate reported in The Washington Times -- a shock that surprises administration officials and Chinese experts, who say it is common knowledge that China has weapons targeted on the United States, and that the United States has many times more nuclear missiles aimed at China.
Among the key issues for the summit talks are those involving proliferation -- China's exports of potentially dangerous equipment, materials, chemicals and technology to Iran and Pakistan, which recently set off nuclear-test explosions after those by India.
China, in the 1980s, was responsible for giving Pakistan the expertise, bomb design and fissile material to become a nuclear nation, and was sanctioned twice by the United States, in 1991 and 1993, for providing Pakistan with medium-range missiles, the M-11, and missile parts.
China then pledged not to provide any more M-11 assistance under the Missile Technology Control Regime. While China has agreed to abide by the regime, which covers missiles that can carry a 500-kilogram (1,100-pound) warhead 300 kilometers (about 190 miles), it has refused thus far to sign it and its detailed annexes of banned dual-use equipment.
Chinese technological assistance to Pakistan continues, but Pakistan's recent Ghauri missile was produced with North Korean parts, not Chinese.
Another key issue for Clinton, arguably more important than detargeting, is to get China to codify its pledge to further restrict assistance to Pakistan. China made that pledge during a meeting of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- China, the United States, Britain, France and Russia -- on June 4 in Geneva. At the meeting, the permanent members, all acknowledged nuclear powers, discussed the nuclear tests of India and Pakistan.
In a communique, the countries all agreed, "consistent with their policies," to prevent the export of equipment, materials or technology that can in any way assist programs in India or Pakistan for nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles capable of delivering such weapons.
That pledge was vague, U.S. officials acknowledge, and they are trying to get the Chinese to codify it into their laws and regulations "in some more enforceable form," an official said. The Americans are also hoping that the pledge could stretch to include missiles with shorter ranges than those covered under the Missile Technology Control Regime, but expect Beijing to reject that interpretation.
In a related issue, the Americans are trying to get Beijing to further restrict its chemical industry from exporting dual-use chemicals and equipment to Iran that could be used for chemical weapons. The Chinese are studying U.S. proposals for new and tighter export controls and methods. In May 1997, Washington sanctioned seven companies and individuals for such trade, but some of it continues.
Given previous cases of the diversion of supercomputers and other high-tech exports from civilian to military uses, Washington also wants China to agree to outside inspections of enterprises buying these devices, before the shipment and afterward. The Chinese have agreed to look carefully at the issue, but say that their sovereignty will be violated by mandatory postshipment inspections.
The Americans are also pressing China for a breakthrough on at least one sector, perhaps agriculture, in accelerated negotiations on China's entry into the World Trade Organization. Membership would require significant market openings to outside goods, which would be hard for China in the middle of the Asian financial crisis, and would require politically risky layoffs.