Is China Changing Its Position on Nuclear Weapons?

[bananas]

2. The US has been placing missile defense systems around China

http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2013/03/md-arc-being-created-across-asia-pacific.html

Tuesday, March 26, 2013
MISSILE DEFENSE ARC BEING CREATED ACROSS ASIA-PACIFIC

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While the US claims that its MD program is aimed at North Korea's tiny nuclear program, the growing numbers of systems now being deployed in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Okinawa (and the direction they point) indicate they are in actuality being used against China.

Some reports have indicated that the Pentagon is also considering plans to deploy a third radar somewhere else in the region like the Philippines to create an “arc” across East Asia to bolster MD capabilities.

This is destabilizing, as the NYT article in the OP points out:

So China may intend the new language in its white paper to send a signal: that in a future crisis, if it concluded that the United States was about to attack its nuclear arsenal with conventional weapons that were backed up by missile defenses, China might use its nuclear weapons first. The United States should recognize this concern; it was called “use ’em or lose ’em” during the cold war.

That's why we used to have treaties against anti-ballistic missiles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty or ABMT) was a treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union on the limitation of the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems used in defending areas against missile-delivered nuclear weapons.

Signed in 1972, it was in force for the next 30 years until the US unilaterally withdrew from it in June 2002.

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On December 13, 2001, George W. Bush gave Russia notice of the United States' withdrawal from the treaty, in accordance with the clause that required six months' notice before terminating the pact—the first time in recent history that the United States has withdrawn from a major international arms treaty. This led to the eventual creation of the American Missile Defense Agency.[12]

Supporters of the withdrawal argued that it was a necessity in order to test and build a limited National Missile Defense to protect the United States from nuclear blackmail by a rogue state. The withdrawal had many critics as well as supporters. John Rhinelander, a negotiator of the ABM treaty, predicted that the withdrawal would be a "fatal blow" to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and would lead to a "world without effective legal constraints on nuclear proliferation." The construction of a missile defense system was also feared to enable the US to attack with a nuclear first strike.

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