Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Article 1:
“Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.”
_________________________________________________
Looming over the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference, which opened in New York City today, is the question of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and whether China can be persuaded to join in a program of strengthened sanctions to slow down or even stop the program.
In this connection, it is crucial for all interested parties to bear in mind–all the states meeting today in New York, and all the governments negotiating with or about Iran–that the alarming Iranian situation is in no small part of China’s making.
Since 2003-04, with the disclosure of NPT violations by Iran without precedent in the IAEA’s history, it’s been clear that Iran’s nuclear program benefited considerably from foreign assistance. By the end of 2004, the IAEA had established on the basis of physical evidence that Iran’s initial centrifuge technology had come from Pakistan—that it was the technology A.Q. Khan had purloined from EURENCO.
Meanwhile, Libya had owned up to having bought a “turn-key” nuclear weapons development program from A.Q. Khan, which included a blueprint for an atomic bomb, almost certainly hand-annotated by Khan, as detailed by William Langewiesche in The Atomic Bazaar ( p.115). That blueprint, the one Pakistan had used for its first atomic bomb, had come from China at the beginning of the 1980s and in essence was the blueprint for China’s first bomb.
As far as I know, every specialist who has looked closely at this subject agrees that China gave Pakistan the design of its first atomic bomb, that A.Q. Khan sold the design to Libya—and that he almost certainly sold it to Iran as well.
That’s not all. Last year, Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman published a book in which they made the still more sensational allegation that when Pakistan had built its first bomb to Chinese specifications, China then tested the device for Pakistan at its Lop Nur test site. For some reason, this astounding claim has received little attention or discussion, even though the qualifications of the authors are not to be sneezed at: Reed, having started his career as a physicist and nuclear weapon designer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, served as Secretary of the Air Force for both President Ford and President Carter; Stillman had served for many years as chief of scientific intelligence at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Their book, Nuclear Express, has come in for some withering criticism, notably in a review by Robert S. Norris, Jeremy Bernstein and Peter D. Zimmerman in the Nonproliferation Review (July 2009). The three authors of that review found a great many technical errors in Nuclear Express (some serious, some rather quibbling), and, in particular, took Reed and Stillman to task for ascribing a dire motive to the Chinese. Reed and Stillman assert that Deng Xiaoping’s government adopted a policy of promoting nuclear proliferation in the Third World in order to make life difficult for the West. As the three reviewers say, there’s no serious evidence to back up that implausible view.
But the review does not address the issue of whether China tested Pakistan’s first atomic bomb at Lop Nur on May 26, 1990, though Reed and Stillman present four compelling technical arguments in support of their claim (pp. 252-3). However, in a personal communication today, lead author Norris said he agrees with their assertion about the test. “Not everything in the book is wrong,” he said.
On the face of it, when China turned over weapons technology to Pakistan it was acting on the oldest and most basic principle of geopolitics: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Since it was clear since 1974 that India had developed nuclear weapons, China decided to help Pakistan do the same. Unfortunately, the centrifuge technology and proven bomb design it gave Pakistan ended up in Libyan hands as well, and almost certainly Iran’s.
How reprehensible, in hindsight, was that? China at the time it delivered the technology to Pakistan had not joined the NPT and, unlike France, had not promised to abide by its provisions. So in narrow legal terms, China was in the clear. But was there a generally accepted norm against nuclear weapons states giving bomb technology to non-weapons states? There most certainly was.
In 1974, when India tested what it claimed disingenuously was a “peaceful nuclear device,” only about half the countries in the world had signed the NPT and well under half had ratified it; a lot of countries agreed with India’s position that the treaty was unfair and unreasonable. But by May 1990, when China did the Lop Nur test for Pakistan, well over two thirds of the world’s countries had ratified the treaty, and the NPT was on its way to near-universal membership. (Today, only India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan are non-members.)
In terms of elementary morality and accepted nuclear etiquette, China did a bad thing when it gave Pakistan atomic bomb technology. Iran now must be presumed to have that technology. China owes us one.
