Pakistan's China Connection to Nuclear Trouble
April 26, 2016 6:00 AM EST
By
Eli Lake
Pakistan held its annual military day parade and displayed its new medium-range nuclear missiles last month, and it barely made a splash in Washington. But at least one analyst was paying close attention.
Richard Fisher, an expert on Chinese military technology at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, began studying the public satellite photographs of the Shaheen III missiles and came to an alarming conclusion: The transport-erector-launcher, or TEL, for the Pakistani mobile rocket matched a Chinese design that Beijing had exported in 2011 to North Korea.
Specifically, Fisher found that the Chinese, North Korean and Pakistani TELs shared the same foothold shape, the same chassis slope and the same exhaust processing system over the engine compartment.
Now, two leading Republicans in Congress are asking the Pentagon, the State Department and the director of national intelligence to look into Fisher's findings. I obtained a copy of the letter from Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on terrorism and strategic forces, and Ted Poe of Texas, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on nonproliferation and trade.
Poe and Rogers are alarmed. While China and Pakistan have cooperated on military technology for decades, and China's government announced in 2013 it would be assisting with the construction of nuclear power plants in Karachi, the extent of China's cooperation with Pakistan's nuclear weapons program has always been murky. Since the 1980s, the U.S. government has had its suspicions that China assisted Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. But U.S. presidents have also certified publicly since the 1980s that China was not a nuclear proliferator.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/articles/2016-04-26/pakistan-s-china-connection-to-nuclear-trouble
