His new book The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation, co-written with Danny Stillman, the former director of the technical intelligence division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, rewrites much of the public understanding about how countries with nuclear weapons came to acquire them. All countries that built bombs, including the United States, spied on or were given access to the work of other nuclear powers. In particular, the book is a scathing indictment of the Chinese government, alleging that it intentionally proliferated nuclear technology to risky regimes, particularly Pakistan.

How has the Chinese government reacted to the allegations in your book?

At first, they objected to some of this reporting, which was first published in Physics Today, but they later withdrew all objections. The Chinese experts in the weapons labs were probably surprised that we found out all this information and were able to put it all together. In public they say one thing, but behind closed doors and after hours, they are more open. All scientists want the credit for having solved certain problems by themselves without outside help. In fact, in 1949 Klaus Fuchs spied for the Soviets at Los Alamos and when he was released from prison in 1959, fled to East Germany where he met China’s chief atomic bomb scientist to whom he explained the inner workings of the Fat Man bomb [which the United States dropped on Nagasaki in 1945].

What was the Chinese strategy behind encouraging proliferation once they had mastered the atomic bomb? The way you describe the Chinese intentionally spreading nuclear technology to countries like Pakistan and North Korea seems both shockingly lax and shortsighted.
Shockingly lax?

Yes. Shortsighted I’m not so sure.

Think of it as three constituencies: China in about 1982, under Deng Xiaoping, decided to proliferate nuclear technology to communists and Muslims in the third world. They did so deliberately with the theory that if nukes ended up going off in the western world from a Muslim terrorist, well that wasn’t all bad. If New York was reduced to rubble without Chinese fingerprints on the attack, that left Beijing as the last man standing. That’s what the old timers thought.

The current Chinese government is far more cautious, though it continued to push technology to North Korea. When the North Koreans decided to test, they clearly did so without a Chinese permit and it really frosted the Chinese because it threatened to prompt Japan and South Korea to start their own programs. They didn’t worry about terrorism at all.

The younger generation is adamant about keeping a lid on nuclear technology. They don’t want to see Los Angeles blown up because they just sold us 10,000 pairs of sneakers. Those last two forces are contending with each other and it remains to be seen what will happen.

Why , as you say in the book, did the Chinese give the technology to Pakistan?

Pakistan can be explained by a balance of power: India was China’s enemy and Pakistan was India’s enemy. The Chinese did a massive training of Pakistani scientists, (just like the Russians had done for them) brought them to China for lectures, even gave them the design of the CHIC-4 device, which was a weapon that was easy to build a model for export. There is evidence that A.Q. Khan used Chinese designs in his nuclear designs. Notes from those lectures later turned up in Libya, for instance. And the Chinese did similar things for the Saudis, North Koreans, and the Algerians.

Did the Chinese further assist in the Pakistan program?

Under Pakistani president Benazir Bhutto, the country built its first functioning nuclear weapon. We believe that during Bhutto’s term in office, the People’s Republic of China tested Pakistan’s first bomb for her in 1990.There are numerous reasons why we believe this to be true, including the design of the weapon and information gathered from discussions with Chinese nuclear experts. That’s why the Pakistanis were so quick to respond to the Indian nuclear tests in 1998. It only took them two weeks and three days. When the Soviet Union took the United States by surprise with a test in 1961, it took the U.S. seventeen days to prepare and test, a device that had been on hand for years. The Pakistani response makes it clear that the gadget tested in May 1998 was a carefully engineered device in which they had great confidence.

Is sharing nuclear tests common?

The United States conducted nuclear tests in Nevada openly and with full disclosure in the 1990s on behalf of our U.K. allies. We speculate on Israeli access to the U.S. test results. For their part, the Chinese admitted to having conducted hydronuclear and radiation effects tests for France, but most tellingly they also implied-they certainly did not deny-the test of a Pakistani device. The South Africans also apparently worked with the Israelis on a nuclear test in the South Pacific in 1979.

Are Chinese proliferation programs ongoing?

Since 1991, China has been assisting the raw-materials side of the Iranian nuclear program with shipments of uranium, instructions on the design of a conversion facility in Eshfahan, and an enrichment facility at Karaj. China has been using North Korea as the re-transfer point for the sale of nuclear and missile technology to Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen.

You also write that Israel was given assistance in developing their bomb while the United States looked the other way.

In the wake of the Suez crisis in 1956, the French and the Israelis initiated a joint nuclear weapons program that resulted in a test in the Algerian desert. At that test in 1960, two countries went nuclear with one shot.

Is the world safer or more dangerous with all these powers?
The world is safer for having all the permanent UN Security Council members possess nuclear weapons. I think having North Korea, Pakistan, and India is probably not a good idea. Nuclear proliferation, above all, is not inevitable as many thought at the dawn of the nuclear age.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/world/2009/01/02/why-china-helped-countries-like-pakistan-north-korea-build-nuclear-bombs.html

He and his CIA handlers walked Warsaw’s cobbled streets searching for rendezvous spots while dodging the secret police. He used a secret CIA-designed camera disguised as a cigarette lighter to photograph precious military secrets. And after nearly a decade of spying, Kuklinski and his family fled, ducking under the Iron Curtain while hidden beneath blankets in the back seat of a car with a CIA officer at the wheel.

On the anniversary of the imposition of martial law in Poland, which marked the end of his spying career, the CIA declassified 82 documents related to his work, totaling some 1,000 pages. Kuklinski, who died in 2004, never asked for money in exchange for the work he’d done, although he was relocated to Florida under government protection and an assumed name after fleeing Warsaw.

“His reports provided a deep understanding of the principal national security challenge we faced, and reduced the chance for miscalculation. In that sense, he clearly saved lives,” CIA Director Michael Hayden told an intelligence symposium coinciding with the release of the documents. “We often compare intelligence analysis to putting together a jigsaw puzzle without a picture to go by, and with a lot of pieces missing. Colonel Kuklinski didn’t just give us a piece or two—he gave us the picture itself.”

Kuklinski joined the Polish Army at age 17 and made a remarkable rise through the ranks, eventually becoming a trusted staff officer involved in military planning. By then, Poland had become, in essence, a client state of the Soviet Union and a pillar of the Warsaw Pact. It was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that finally persuaded the Polish colonel to begin working with the West.

It was in his capacity as a senior planner that Kuklinski first saw Soviet planning for a war with the West, plans that he realized were offensive in nature. He understood that nations like Poland would be sacrificed by the Soviet military, used as a buffer to weaken NATO forces before the Red Army advanced across Europe to the English Channel. It was a war plan that promised catastrophic destruction and the use of hundreds of nuclear weapons.

In his native Poland, Kuklinski remains a controversial figure, though the animosity of his countrymen toward him has faded with time. Many Poles still cannot reconcile the idea of a good soldier with the man who gave his nation’s military schematics to the enemy so that NATO could more accurately target nuclear weapons for potential use against military sites in Poland.

When the colonel returned to his native land in 1998, after his conviction and death sentence for treason was finally overturned, he was met by supporters as well as hostile critics, particularly within the military and among veterans.

“Much of the debate around this case has been, ‘If he was right, then other Polish officers must have been wrong,’” says Benjamin Weiser, author of A Secret Life, a biography of Kuklinski. “It was hard for Poles to understand his story and why Kuklinski did what he did.”

Yet Kuklinski never condemned his fellow Polish officers. “I not only never placed the mission I had undertaken in opposition to the selfless service of my former comrades in arms, but I never placed it higher either,” Weiser recounts Kuklinski telling an audience in Poland.

But the record shows that the colonel believed the only way to avoid Armageddon was to create a stalemate, even if that meant compromising his own government. Not that this was his initial choice. The CIA officers who initially met Kuklinski found a man offering to lead his fellow officers in a revolt, should a situation demand it. Instead, Langley convinced Kuklinski that information-sharing was the most effective means of avoiding war.

The height of Kuklinksi’s usefulness to American intelligence came in 1981 as the Solidarity movement was gaining momentum in Poland and threatening to topple the government. Officials in Moscow and Warsaw considered imposing martial law and Kuklinski was in the office that drew up the operational plans. Forty-two of the 82 newly declassified documents deal with martial law planning around this period.

The historical value of the new documents—that is, how they may reshape a scholarly understanding of the Warsaw Pact and the Solidarity movement—has yet to be determined, says Christian Ostermann, director of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Historians will need time to study the new items in depth.

Ironically, however, some of the information in the newly released documents has already been available to historians in the original Polish and Russian after the opening of former Communist archives.

But by any measure, the nature of the material Kuklinski passed to the West was stunning.

The CIA now acknowledges that the soft-spoken, chain-smoking colonel provided a full set of Soviet plans for attacking NATO; a systematic description of how the Warsaw Pact would mobilize for war; the exact location of command-and-control bunkers, along with details on their construction and military communications systems; information on some 200 weapon systems, as well as Warsaw Pact techniques used for evading U.S. satellite surveillance.

But the real reason the spy community celebrates Kuklinski more than, say, the handful of other high-ranking Polish officers who also passed information to the CIA, is for the nine years when he allowed the United States an unobstructed view of Soviet and Polish military decision making.

“No one else provided so much detailed information over such a long period of time. It allowed us to understand how the Warsaw Pact thought,” says Aris Pappas, a former CIA official who analyzed much of Kuklinski’s raw reports from the field. All told, Kuklinski photographed more than 40,250 pages of military secrets and passed them to Langley.