China and Iran: Ancient Partners in a Post-Imperial World

6. China's Assistance to Iran's Nuclear Programs

6 / China’s Assistance to Iran’s Nuclear Programs china’s nuclear industry and the nonproliferation regime S upportforIraniannuclearprogramswasakeyelementof Beijing’seªort to forge a partnership with Iran in the 1980s and 1990s. From 1985 to 1997 China was Iran’s major nuclear partner. While China was not Iran’s only foreign nuclear partner during that period, it was by far the most important . During that period, China in eªect assisted Iran in circumventing u.s.led international opposition to Iran’s nuclear eªorts. Iranian leaders viewed their nuclear programs as extremely important, and China’s support in this area made Beijing valuable to Tehran. Eventually, in 1997, China abandoned its nuclear cooperation with Iran under intense u.s. pressure and in order to safeguard China’s vital relation with the United States, a disengagement that tells much about the role of Iran in China’s overall diplomacy and which will be examined in a later chapter. The nuclear relation between China and Iran was denied by both parties for six years and was publicly acknowledged beginning only in 1991. Even then many aspects of the relationship remained secret and were revealed only more than a decade later. Important documentation on the relationship was provided by Iran and China to the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2003.1 While iaea reports of 2003–4 refer only to unnamed “foreign suppliers” and “foreign states,” these references can often be triangulated with other information to ascertain with fair certainty which of those foreign states was China. China’s early experience with nuclear nonproliferation was not positive. As the Soviet Union and the United States began to recognize common interests in restricting the proliferation of nuclear weapons during the late 1950s, 139 China’s nuclear eªort was a major target of the incipient nonproliferation regime. Soviet assistance to China’s nuclear eªorts began in 1955, and in 1957 it was embodied in a comprehensive nuclear cooperation agreement that included Soviet assistance in Chinese manufacture of atomic weapons. By mid-1959,however,SovietleaderNikitaKhrushchevhadconcludedthatSoviet interests were best served by keeping nuclear weapons out of Mao Zedong’s hands, and Moscow abrogated the 1957 nuclear agreement. Shortly afterward, in August 1959, Khrushchev made the first-ever visit to the United States by a top Soviet leader, thereby opening the period of Soviet-u.s. “peaceful coexistence ” that lead to the first element of the global nonproliferation regime, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Beijing saw, with considerable justice, Soviet-American antinuclear proliferation eªorts as directed against China. As the United States and the Soviet Union began mobilizing international support for a Non-Proliferation Treaty (npt, signed in 1968 and brought into eªect in 1970), Beijing saw that treaty as a joint “superpower” (u.s. and ussr) eªort to maintain global military dominance. The five “nuclear weapons states” recognized by the npt were free to possess and develop nuclear weapons as they saw fit, while other countries were prohibited from acquiring such weapons. Significantly China was one of the five nuclear weapons states legitimized by the npt—testament to recognition by Washington, Moscow, and London when the npt was being drafted that China would someday need to be incorporated into that regime. (China tested an atomic bomb in 1964 and a hydrogen bomb in 1967.) The standing invitation to China tobecomealegitimatenuclearweaponsstateunderthenpt meantthatBeijing had the option of acting on the same realist logic (i.e., maintaining military superiority) that inspired Moscow and Washington, at least in Beijing’s view, to establish the npt. China would move decisively along these lines in 1997 when it finally disengaged from Iran’s nuclear eªort. China under Mao, however , wanted nothing to do with such an arrangement. The purpose of the npt regime, Mao concluded, was to uphold the ability of the two superpowers to threaten or even use nuclear weapons against other states without fear of retaliation. The npt was an attempt by the u.s. “imperialists” and the Soviet “social imperialists” to uphold their ability to exercise “nuclear blackmail” against Third World countries, which were the major victims of superpower aggression. From this standpoint the more Third World countries that acquired nuclear weapons, the better. China’s large investments in nuclear weapons production starting in 1955 meant that when the “opening to the outside world” began under Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China had a very large nuclear industry, entirely military but underpinned by an array of basic know-how and...