Asked at the White House whether he would sit down with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping on the sidelines of next month’s APEC summit in Shenzhen, Donald Trump steered the conversation from Ukraine to warheads. “We would have it to talk about nuclear weapons and denuclearization,” he said. Russia, he added, “has been fine on Ukraine.” In the same exchange he suggested it was time for someone other than Volodymyr Zelensky to negotiate for Kyiv.

Two proposals now ride on one invitation. Putin, according to The Wall Street Journal , pitched the meeting as a way to end the war on terms that favor Moscow. Trump pitched it as arms control. Only one of them belongs in Shenzhen.

The summit itself is worth holding. The two largest nuclear arsenals have gone more than eight months without a single binding limit since New START expired on February 5. Trump turned down Putin’s offer to observe its ceilings voluntarily for another year, saying he wanted a better treaty. He has no better treaty. He has a venue.

The objection is easy to predict: China will refuse to play. Beijing’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, Mao Ning , said last week that asking China to join trilateral disarmament talks “at this stage” is “neither fair, reasonable nor realistic,” and that the United States carries “special and primary responsibility.” In Washington, that line will be interpreted as obstruction.

Read the numbers before reading the motive. SIPRI’s latest yearbook puts the U.S. military stockpile at 3,700 warheads and Russia’s at 4,400. China holds about 620 . Even if Beijing passes 1,000 by 2030, SIPRI notes, it would have about a quarter of either arsenal. Russia and the United States control roughly 83 percent of the world’s usable warheads.

A negotiation that asks the smallest of the three to freeze first is not arms control. It asks China to accept permanent inferiority as the entry fee. When Washington and Moscow signed SALT I in 1972, nobody asked Britain, France, or China to sign too.

However, China’s arsenal is growing faster than anyone’s. SIPRI estimates that Beijing may now have around 34 warheads deployed with operational forces, up from 24, and it has loaded missiles into three new silo fields. Washington’s worry is not invented.

Three things could come out of that room that none of the three leaders would have to sell at home as a defeat.

The first would be a restored ceiling. Washington and Moscow can announce that they will observe New START’s central limit of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads for 12 months and resume data exchanges. Russia has already said that it would keep to those limits if the United States does. The pledge costs Trump nothing, and the Arms Control Association has suggested the three leaders could reaffirm their test-ban commitments in the same statement.

Second, China could offer something that corresponds to the size of its arsenal. Beijing has held to a no-first-use pledge since its first test in 1964 and has pressed the other nuclear powers for years to adopt one as well. A three-way reaffirmation of the January 2022 statement by the five nuclear powers that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, paired with a leaders’ hotline and missile-launch notifications among the three, would bring China into a risk-reduction process without asking it to cap an arsenal that’s a fraction of the others. That is a track Beijing can accept, and the host of the summit has every reason to want it to work.

Third, the leaders could agree to a written firewall. The communiqué should state plainly that Ukrainian territory is not on the Shenzhen agenda. Here Beijing’s own record helps. China’s February 2023 position paper on the war opened with respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries. On Monday, Mao Ning said that the ministry had no information about any trilateral meeting. Beijing has shown no appetite for hosting the carve-up of a third country, and it has every interest in a Shenzhen summit remembered for warheads rather than borders.

The firewall matters because the alternative is already visible. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha , warned that a meeting of the three without Kyiv would “encourage Putin to continue this war.” The day after Trump called Russia “fine,” a Russian drone strike near the Kyiv-Odesa highway killed three people . The Washington Post reported that the administration has not approved the interceptors Kyiv needs.

A summit that swaps arms control for Ukrainian land would hand Putin the prize his army has failed to take, and it would discredit the nuclear track for a generation.

From Karachi, the picture is less abstract. The big three are not the only problem. SIPRI counts India at 190 warheads and Pakistan at about 170 , and in May 2025 the two traded missile and drone strikes in the heaviest fire between nuclear-armed neighbors in decades. A Shenzhen deal will freeze nothing below the top tier. It would at least show that great powers can still sign something. South Asia has not seen such an example in a long time.

Trump likes to say he ends wars. He has a better chance of ending an arms race that has run without rules since February, and he can do it in a city whose host wants the meeting to succeed.

The test will be visible when APEC closes on November 19 . If the Shenzhen statement carries the number 1,550, the summit will have done what no arms control meeting has managed in five years. If it carries the word Ukraine without a Ukrainian in the room, it will be remembered as Yalta with a nuclear footnote.

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