China tested nukes for Pakistan, gave design
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA, TNN 5 September 2008, 10:46am IST
WASHINGTON: While an assortment of non-proliferation hardliners and hi-tech suppliers treat India with immense suspicion in the matter of nuclear trade predicated on tests, it turns out that the United States and the west were fully aware of Chinese nuclear weapons proliferation to Pakistan, including conducting a proxy test for it, as far back as 1990.
In some of the most startling revelations to emerge on the subject, a high-ranking former US official who was also a nuclear weapons designer has disclosed that ''in 1982 China's premier Deng Xiaoping began the transfer of nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan.''
The whistleblower isn't a think-tank academic or an unnamed official speaking on background. Thomas Reed, described as a former U.S ''nuclear weaponeer'' and a Secretary of the Air Force (1976-77) writes in the latest issue of Physics Today that China's transfers to Pakistan included blueprints for the ultrasimple CHIC-4 design using highly enriched uranium, first tested by China in 1966. A Pakistani derivative of CHIC-4 apparently was tested in China on 26 May 1990, he adds.
Reed makes an even more stunning disclosure, saying Deng not only authorized proliferation to Pakistan, but also, "in time, to other third world countries.'' The countries are not named. He also says that during the 1990s, China conducted underground hydronuclear experiments—though not full-scale device tests—for France at Lop Nur.
Reed's disclosures are based on his knowledge of and insights into the visits to China by Dan Stillman, a top US nuclear expert who went there several times in the late 1980s at Beijing invitation, in part because the Chinese wanted to both show-off and convey to the US the progress they had made in nuclear weaponisation.
One of Stillman's visit to the Shanghai Institute of Nuclear Research (SINR), writes Reed, ''also produced his first insight into the extensive hospitality extended to Pakistani nuclear scientists during that same late-1980s time period,'' which would eventually lead to the joint China-Pak nuclear test.
Chinese nuclear proliferation to Pakistan, including the supply of hi-tech items like ring magnets in the early 1990s, has always been known to the non-proliferation community (which largely slept on the reports). But this is the first time it has been confirmed by such a senior official.
In the late 1980s, both the Reagan and the George Bush Sr administration repeatedly fudged the issue to certify that Pakistan had not gone nuclear despite obvious evidence to the contrary.
In his assessment of the Chinese nuclear program based on Stillman's visits, Reed writes admiringly about Beijing's successes, saying ''Over a period of 15 years, an intellectually talented China achieved parity with the West and pre-eminence over its Asian peers in the design of nuclear weapons and in understanding underground nuclear testing.''
"China now stands in the first rank of nuclear powers," he concludes.
In trenchant observation, Reed writes, ''Any nuclear nation should consider its nuclear tests to be giant physics experiments. The Chinese weaponeers understood that well; other proliferators do not. Many states have considered their early nuclear shots to be political demonstrations or simple proof tests. In China, however, extremely sophisticated instrumentation was used on even the first nuclear test.''
Chronicling the progress of China's nuclear weapons program, Reed writes: Atop a tower on 16 October 1964, China's first nuclear device, 596, was successfully fired. US intelligence analysts were astonished by the lack of plutonium in the fallout debris and by the speed with which China had broken into the nuclear club, but that was only the beginning.
Eighteen months later, in the spring of 1966, China entered the thermonuclear world with the detonation of a boosted-fission, airdropped device that used lithium-6, a primary source of tritium when bombarded with neutrons. That test, their third, achieved a yield of 200–300 kilotons. By the end of the year, they made the leap to multistage technology with a large two-stage experiment that yielded only 122 kilotons, but it again displayed 6Li in the bomb debris.
The Chinese then closed the circle on 17 June 1967, unambiguously marching into the H-bomb club with a 3.3-megaton burst from an aircraft-delivered weapon. On 27 December 1968, the Chinese bid the Johnson administration farewell with an improved, airdropped 3-megaton thermonuclear device that for the first time used plutonium in the primary.
It is clear from the reactor-to-bomb progression times that by 1968 China had unequivocally entered the European nuclear cartel on a par with the U, says Reed. Furthermore, China had become a thermonuclear power. It had achieved the leap from the initial A-bomb test to a 3.3-megaton thermonuclear blast in a record-breaking 32 months. It had taken the US more than seven years to accomplish that feat.
Thanks. I have posted first available links on google.
