What chance of a new arms-cutting treaty?

Mark Esper, US defence secretary, visited the US Air Force base at Minot in North Dakota today, home of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)and B-52s, The question of a future arms control treaty came up. It's called the New Start (strategic arms reduction treaty). Esper was all for it but pointed out, as if in some dismay, that both Russia and China were furiously modernising their nuclear weapons and developing systems like hypersonic cruise missiles. So that all had to stop, he implied. That's all fine and lovely but, as I am sure Secretary Esper knows, the United States is also furiously modernising its nuclear triad as it's called: new ICBMS to replace the 400 ageing Minuteman III missiles, some of them held in silos at Minot, a successor to the B-2 Stealth bomber, called the B-21, and a new geeration of ballistic-missile submarines, the Columbia class, to replace the Los Angeles class. And there's a lot of money now going into hypersonic weapons to catch up with the Russians and Chinese. So, Mr Esper, everyone's in the same modernising game. But the crucial point he did make was that China must be persuaded to join the New Start process. China has always said nuclear arms treaties are for the big boys, ie the US and Russia, the former Cold War enemies because each nation has a stockpile of missiles that far outnumbers anything China has got. Well, true. But China is making headway to increase its arsenal and at some point Beijing needs to acknowledge that it has a responsibility to make sensible decisions with its fellow big-time nuclear powers to reduce or at least restrain the nuclear arms race. But China, unfortunately, will never go for that argument, at least not for 20-30 years, because only then will Beijing reach some form of parity with the US, with a rival force of aircraft carriers, ICBMS and submarines. So Mr Esper's hopes at Minot will blow away in the North Dakota wind.