Newly declassified U.S. government documents made public Friday shed new light on almost three decades of U.S. unease over China’s suspected cooperation with Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.
For 15 years, over the course of four U.S. administrations, China ducked and denied repeated American inquiries about Beijing’s cooperation with Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.
But one of the briefing papers released on Friday states: “We have concluded that China has provided assistance to Pakistan’s program to develop a nuclear weapon capability” in the areas of fissile material production and possibly also in nuclear device design.
Researchers who obtained the documents and made them public said that exactly what the U.S. government knew about Chinese nuclear sharing with Pakistan remains highly secret.
But the newly released cables and memos provide specific details on how U.S. officials looked at the China-Pakistani nuclear relationship, how they persistently tried to discourage it and how Chinese diplomats repeatedly denied any involvement, said William Burr of the National Security Archive, a research institute at George Washington University.
The material obtained by the archive under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act run from 1965 through 1997 and discusses U.S. concerns about China-Pakistan security and military cooperation dating back to the mid-1960s.
The documents’ release comes at a time of great interest in proliferation because of revelations by Abdul Qadeer Khan, father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, who recently admitted to selling nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
Pakistan followed rival India in conducting nuclear tests in 1998.
Amid growing concerns about the breadth of the global nuclear black market, the Washington Post reported last month that investigators had discovered the nuclear weapon design obtained by Libya through Khan’s network originated in China.
Burr said that until the revelations from the Libyan files, “no evidence had surfaced that conclusively linked China with Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.”
Problem downplayed
However, the Bush administration, which boasts that U.S. ties with nuclear-armed China have never been better, has played down the Chinese nuclear connection.
Undersecretary of State John Bolton, the top U.S. arms control official, said on a visit to Beijing two weeks ago that despite past sales of nuclear-related technology, China now seems to be cooperating with the United States to prevent proliferation.
In a 1983 State Department briefing paper, the writer begins: “There is unambiguous evidence that Pakistan is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons development program.”
Even then, the Americans knew that “technology obtained by Pakistan in Europe has provided the base for the development of the new labs” yet they suspected Chinese involvement.
At various points, Chinese officials denied or were ambiguous about their nuclear involvement with Pakistan and then in 1996, under the Clinton administration, Beijing made a public declaration that it would not assist nuclear facilities like Pakistan’s that were not under international safeguards.
But CIA Director George Tenet, in a report covering the period as recently as June 2003, said his agency could not rule out continued contacts between China and Pakistan on the nuclear issue.
