ABSTRACT
Why the U.S.-China nuclear strategic relations have become unstable in recent years? What was the critical historical juncture of significant material manifestation that fuelled the two great powers’ strategic instability? This chapter will argue that China’s build-ups of the artificial islands in the South China Sea from 2013 and onwards have fundamentally altered not just the U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China nuclear strategic relations, but triggered theoretical and policy paradigm shifts regarding the U.S.-China relations in the South China Sea.
In this chapter, I will bring in two interlinked new contributions to the fields. First is the new theoretical contribution of structural realism. Second is to empirically incorporate the increasingly important policy issues of arms control, which include nuclear submarines, missile defence systems, anti-satellite and cyber-network warfare capabilities.
In the midst of living with the structural realist spirit as the common logic of the nuclear powers, I uphold there is still a hope to build a new human community of shared destiny on earth as it is in the heavenly outer space.
