Race escalates for latest class of nuclear arms

Washington

THE United States, Russia and China are aggressively pursuing a new generation of smaller, less destructive nuclear weapons. The build-ups threaten to revive a Cold War-era arms race and unsettle the balance of destructive force among nations that has kept the nuclear peace for more than a half-century.

It is, in large measure, an old dynamic playing out in new form as an economically declining Russia, a rising China and an uncertain United States resume their one-upmanship.