Chinese are helping Iran develop Nuclear Weapons... Opinions ?

[Ted King]

The BBC article is essentially lifted from a longer article by the Washington Post linked to in the BBC article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...0101703367

Here is an interesting excerpt:

The U.S. official credited China with working hard to establish the bureaucratic structures and laws to control the export of sensitive technologies, but he said China so far has not devoted resources to crack down on violators.
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"China has come a long way in putting in place an export-control system," he said. "But it's one thing to have a system that looks good on the books and it's another thing to have a system that they enforce conscientiously.. . . Where China's system is deficient is on the enforcement side."

China is generally believed to have supplied Pakistan with a blueprint for a nuclear weapon in the 1970s. But Bonnie S. Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said most experts agree that since the late 1990s, China has taken the issue more seriously. Some have argued that President Bill Clinton's administration persuaded China to embrace the issue because it was important to the United States. Others have said China itself understood that selling missile and nuclear weapons-technology, especially to neighbors such as North Korea, was a bad idea.

Both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations determined that China's government was no longer intentionally proliferating. That conclusion allowed Bush to open the door for U.S. nuclear-energy technology to be sold to China in contracts that are expected to be worth billions.

During the trip to China, the U.S. delegation also pushed oil companies, specifically the China National Petroleum Corp. and the China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, to stop or limit their investments in Iran. Both firms have been in negotiations to invest billions in Iran's energy sector although, according to Erica Downs of the Brookings Institution, it is unclear how much they have spent there.

The delegation informed the Chinese of the ramifications that the new U.S. law - the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 - might have for Chinese firms and banks that continued to conduct business in Iran.

"Any Chinese enterprise that has . . . a big stake in good business relations with the United States would have to be mindful of U.S. laws," the U.S. official said.