Why China should not join the INF Treaty

Comments on Petr Suchy and Bradley A. Thayer "Why China should join the INF Treaty", 6/04/2016

The proposal in this post is unworkable at best. That treaty seemed to be the product of either the cold war or the two then super powers.

Firstly, the two treat members had and still have vast numbers of superior nuclear arsenals than China.

Secondly, now there are so many countries beside the two existing treaty members that have the capability to produce or possess the weapons banned by the treaty and China is only one of them. It would be futile to just ask China to join the treaty when it is much inferior in its nuclear weapons and other similar countries are not asked to do the same.

Thirdly, China faces constant security threats, as demonstrated by the flights and sail for the so called freedom of navigations by the US and other US allies.

Fourthly, should China join the treaty and destroy its such missiles, it would have no effective defence of itself in the context of so many aircraft carries that pose significant threats to its security if not to its very existence.

What a joke of such a proposal is, given the uneven military powers in both nuclear and conventional weapons between China and the two super powers!

I don’t think China will go for such vanity as described in this post at the expense of its own security, because the threats are real.