Is China Expanding Its Nuclear Arsenal?

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00:00And Donald Trump is claiming that China is rapidly building its nuclear stockpiles, Tobias,

00:06citing this as one of the reasons to justify his decision. But what more do we know about

00:13China's nuclear program? Because we do know China is very secretive.

00:18It is indeed, but it fits into a bigger picture that China's been pursuing indeed for years. It's

00:25always been China's vision for the last century to become stronger. They were humiliated,

00:31if you know China's history, of that century of humiliation of when countries, including America,

00:36Britain, Holland, France, and so on, took advantage of the weakness of China and actually saw the

00:43empire as it was collapse in the early 1900s, led to a civil war as well. Never again does China ever

00:52want to be open to be exploited in this way. And one of the ways they're preventing that is to build

00:59the largest army, air force and navy in the world, to advance their capabilities in space, in cyber,

01:07and as you say, to build a formidable nuclear arsenal. And they're actually on track to do

01:13exactly that, making, as I say, for a very, very dangerous world. The one good thing about the Cold

01:20War was the fact that there were these back channels. There were these conversations which

01:24said, listen, this is madness, what we're doing. We can destroy the world not once, but many times

01:29over. And we haven't got back to that point. This generation has not got that Cold War statecraft

01:35and acumen and the back channel, the conversations to say, let's keep this in check. Let's consider what

01:42we're doing. Because by accident, things could escalate so quickly and get out of control.