Li Bin is no longer with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Li Bin was a senior fellow working jointly in the Nuclear Policy Program and the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A physicist and expert on nuclear disarmament, his research focuses on China’s nuclear and arms control policy and on U.S.-Chinese nuclear relations.
Li is also a professor of international relations at Tsinghua University. He previously directed the arms control division at the Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, where he also served as executive director of the Program for Science and National Security Studies. Li was a Social Science Research Council–MacArthur Foundation Peace and Security Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University.
In 1996, Li joined the Chinese delegation on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty negotiations.
Li is the author of Arms Control Theories and Analysis and co-editor of Strategy and Security: A Technical View. He has also been published in numerous academic journals, including the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Arms Control Today, Jane’s Intelligence Review, and Science & Global Security.
Li also serves on the boards of several international journals, including Science & Global Security, Nonproliferation Review, and China Security.
Cyber threats to nuclear command, control, and communications systems (NC3) attract increasing concerns. Carnegie and partners have developed a platform of unclassified knowledge to enable U.S.-China engagement on this issue.
International security and stability are facing new challenges with the increase of great power competition and the termination of key arms control treaties, which threaten to destroy the world’s existing cooperative security institutions.
China has three basic paths towards strengthening its nuclear retaliatory capability: It can strengthen the survivability of its nuclear weapons, increase their numbers, or strengthen the capability of each warhead to penetrate missile defense systems.
Given the difficulty of achieving the complete denuclearization of North Korea in the near term, the United States and its allies in the Asia-Pacific have strong incentives to continue building their missile defense capabilities.
International efforts to mitigate potential threats from biotechnologies, such as the Biological Weapons Convention, have so far proven to be of limited effectiveness preventing their misuse.
With the threat of nuclear war growing, China, Russia, and the United States should not wait until political relations improve before making efforts to manage new technologies.
The international community must design a fair and reasonable North Korea denuclearization road map that is politically sustainable, technically operable, and that can protect the long-term interests of all concerned parties.
While the United States argues that its deployment of the THAAD missile defense system in South Korea is necessary to counter the nuclear threat from North Korea, Chinese experts worry that U.S. missile defense assets in the region could undermine China’s strategic nuclear deterrent capability.
Despite the pageantry of the Singapore summit, the outcomes remain uncertain.
In the aftermath of the inter-Korean summit on April 27, and ahead of planned U.S.-North Korea talks, please join Carnegie for a deep dive on the practicalities and politics of denuclearizing North Korea.
