China gave Pakistan design data, training and nuclear material

"If you subtract China’s help from the Pakistani nuclear programme, there is no Pakistani nuclear programme," said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. "And China is not promising to stop its help to Pakistan’s civilian nuclear programme, whichmeans more training, more experience and the possibility of technology transfer from the civilian to military side."

In fact, as early as June 1983, the US was aware of China’s help. A State Department memorandum obtained by NBC News was quite forthright: "We have concluded that China has provided assistance to Pakistan’s programme to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Over the past several years, China and Pakistan have maintained contacts in the nuclear field… We now believe co-operation has taken place in the area of fissile (weapon) material production and also nuclear device design."

It was a record of proliferation that helped US policy-makers stop the sale of nuclear technology to China seven years ago. Now, critics fear, the experience China will get with the more advanced US nuclear technology it can purchase could eventually wind up in any one of a number of places — including Pakistan and Iran.

Pakistan is but one of half-dozen nations that have received China’s help, oftengetting materials they could not get elsewhere. China, for example, supplied Algeria with a research reactor; Argentina with heavy water and enriched uranium; Brazil with enriched uranium; India with heavy water; Iran with training for nuclear technicians, reactor technology and a research reactor; Iraq with lithium hydride; North Korea with training for nuclear technicians, and even South Africa with tonnes of enriched uranium. Many of the countries China helped — like Argentina, Brazil and South Africa — eventually renounced their nuclear weapons programmes.

Pakistan got more than the rest combined. It is no exaggeration to say that China was the chief instrument by which Pakistan got its bomb. The Chinese did for Pakistan in the ’80s exactly what the Russians had done for the Chinese in the ’50s: they provided the critical technology, design data, training and even nuclear materials.

In fact, US and Soviet intelligence would later learn that China actually supplied Pakistan with essentially the samedesign and trigger mechanism that it had perfected in 1966, when it tested its fourth nuclear weapon — the first to be mounted on a missile. Chinese scientists visited the Pakistani weapons design facility in the town of Wah in late 1982 or early 1983 to help determine whether the slightly modified design would work. They supplied enough uranium hexaflouride feedstock to enable operation of Pakistan’s centrifuges, the machines that would produce weapons-grade uranium for its bombs. It was a particularly valuable service since the Pakistanis couldn’t get the equipment needed to make their own feedstock.

Chinese scientific and technical delegations also spent a "substantial amount of time" at the Pakistan’s secret uranium centrifuge plan near the town of Kahuta, according to one expert. China in turn invited hundreds of Pakistani scientists and technicians to witness and evaluate its own nuclear weapons tests throughout the 80s.

Much of the information came not from Pakistan, where the US had agentsgalore, but from a spy inside the Chinese nuclear establishment.

At great personal risk, he had described the assistance his country was providing Pakistan and later even helped the CIA obtain the actual design of Pakistan’s first weapon, whose fundamental attributes were decidedly Chinese. The CIA and other US intelligence agencies turned up unambiguous data on Pakistan’s atomic bomb programme and the Chinese aid throughout the ’80s.

And by 1993, three years after the US had determined that Pakistan had readied a small nuclear arsenal during a crisis with India, it had also learned that China was helping Pakistan build a secret military nuclear reactor that could produce plutonium for even larger bombs. The US tried to stall the military reactor, at Khusab, but US intelligence analysts now say that effort is futile.

Late last year, it was still awaiting the arrival of heavy water, which is needed to moderate nuclear reactions in simple reactors like the one at Khusab. That heavy water has now beendelivered and the reactor is operating, albeit at a low level. With the rise in tensions, any hope of keeping that operational tempo low is lost, say analysts.

Milhollin says that China is building a much larger civilian reactor in Pakistan and it is entirely possible that the heavy water that will ultimately be supplied to Pakistan for its civilian reactor could be diverted to the military programme.

"It is important to note that China is not promising," added Milhollin "to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group. That means it will not promise to moderate its sales."

Pakistan’s tight tie with China has always been a double-edged sword for the US. In the ’70s, Pakistan acted as a bridge between the US and China, as the Nixon Administration improved its ties with Beijing. In the ’80s, the two countries worked together to help the CIA supply the Afghan Mujahideen in their fight against the Soviets. In return, it got US aid for more than a decade and a counterweight to use against India.

The problem now, saysMilhollin, is that with China’s help, Pakistan is a nuclear weapons state. That, he noted, does not bode well for Chinese nuclear co-operation with Iran.

(The writer, an investigative producer with NBC News, is an acknowledged expert on US intelligence. He is also the author of Critical Mass, a book on the nuclear tensions in the subcontinent.)