In 1998, China backed out of a contract to build a Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF) for Iran—a victory for US nonproliferation policy during the Clinton Administration. Iran built the facility using the designs China had already provided. Apparently, there were…
Beijing has released a new white paper, China’s Endeavors for Arms Control, Disarmament and Non-Proliferation. The white paper looks to be somewhat longer than its predecessor (released in 2003), with an expanded section covering the implementation and publication of export…
Yang Yegong (杨业功)—a commander in the Second Artillery—has died of bowel cancer. CCTV has a massive retrospective. I have no idea why Yang is a big deal, but it is fun to speculate. This article suggests (I think, it is…
Too many articles about Chinese espionage are about as sophisticated as the plot of a Hong Kong action flick. At least John Woo made stuff blow up. Somebody at the Wall Street Journal saw Hard Boiled one too many times.…
The Defense Department has issued its Annual Report of the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China for 2005. Although the report was the subject of extensive debate, the final document appears relatively mundane. It contains, unlike past reports,…
General Zhu Chenghu (below, right), Dean of the Defense College at the Chinese National Defense University (Guofang Daxue), told a group of Hong Kong journalists including the Financial Times’s Alexandra Harney that China might use nuclear weapons first in a…
Chinese State Councillor Tang Jiaxuan (right, with the Il-iminator) is wrapping up a two day visit to Pyongyang. Kim Jong-Il reportedly told Tang that “the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was the behest of President Kim Il Sung.” Kim also…
Can’t anybody in the US intelligence community speak Chinese? Gregory Kulacki—the man who caught DIA repeating a hoax about a parasite microsatellite that was posted on a Chinese bulletin board—has caught another US intelligence entity just making shit up. Well,…
Dominic Gates at the Seattle Times obtained a draft letter from the State Department to Boeing, notifying the company that Foggy Bottom “has prepared civil charges against Boeing alleging 94 violations of the Arms Control Act because the company sold…
Having an avid interest in the history of China’s nuclear weapons program, I’ve always wondered what life was like at China’s “Los Alamos”—the Northwest Nuclear Weapons Research and Design Academy near Haiyan, where China’s first nuclear weapons were designed and…
