US President Joe Biden's approval in March of a highly classified nuclear strategy that is aimed at countering the "China threat", first exposed by The New York Times' David Sanger on Aug 20, is an insane act of provocation, and a threat to the world peace.

The goal of the "Nuclear Employment Guidance" is to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from China, Russia and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) . But such an assumption is absurd given China's long-standing policy of no-first use of nuclear weapons and minimum deterrence. The US has long rejected China's call for pledging no-first-use.

According to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in June, the US and Russia have more than 1,770 deployed nuclear warheads each, and their respective nuclear inventory exceeds 5,000, accounting for 90 percent the world's total.

It's hard to believe that even three decades after the end of the Cold War, the two countries refuse to dramatically reduce their nuclear arsenal and continue to pose a grave threat to the existence of humans.

The US' intention is clear: To maintain its nuclear supremacy in order to maintain its global hegemony. To achieve that goal, the US unilaterally withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002 and pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019. One year before that, in 2018 to be precise, the US quit the Iran nuclear deal, which was negotiated by the Barack Obama administration when Biden was the vice-president.

During his 2020 campaign, Biden vowed to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal. But once he entered the Oval Office, he forgot all about it. "An unforced error", that's how some Democratic opinion leaders described Biden's promise, or his refusal to honor it. Such irresponsible US actions have triggered widespread concerns even among many US allies in Europe.

In 2011, the US-led NATO bombed and instigated a regime change in Libya by abusing a United Nations Security Council resolution on no-fly zone. That too happened when Biden was the vice-president and years after former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had given up his nuclear program. It had a chilling effect on countries such as the DPRK, which for long have worried about US military aggression, not least because they see the hundreds of US military bases in the Asia-Pacific as a direct threat to them.

Once I asked a senior US official, who was part of the US team that participated in the non-proliferation talks in the 1990s, if he could think of a scenario in which the US would use nuclear weapons. His answer was an instant "No". But Biden seems to believe that annihilation of all humans is still possible.

Biden's secret China-targeted plan should not come as a surprise. Back in June, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg claimed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is mulling increasing the number of nuclear weapons to counter the alleged threat from Russia and China.

The "China threat" theory has been hyped up by Washington and its puppets in a bid to justify the US' monstrous military budget of $916 billion in 2023, more than the combined defense budgets of the next 10 countries or more than three times that of China.

The "Nuclear Employment Guidance" would likely trigger a global arms race. It may also prompt China to strengthen its minimum deterrence strategy to prevent the US and NATO from blackmailing it or any other country by threatening to launch a nuclear war.

Back in 2010, Obama initiated the Nuclear Security Summit, which was endorsed by then Chinese leaders. But Biden has been busy dividing the world instead of uniting it against nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

War and peace have become a key subject of debate in the US presidential race, as evidenced from the speeches of politicians such as Jill Stein, Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. So the international community should pressure the US into reducing its nuclear arsenal and pledging no-first-use. The international community should also renounce Biden's new saber-rattling nuclear strategy.

The author is chief of China Daily EU Bureau based in Brussels.

chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn