Chinese take-out market.

ITEM: The Washington Post for February 17 reported: "A senior U.S. arms control official said ... that, despite past sales of nuclear-related technology, the Chinese government now seems committed to cooperating with the United States to prevent nuclear proliferation in North Korea and elsewhere."

BETWEEN THE LINES: The Bush administration is correct in acknowledging that China has engaged in nuclear weapons proliferation. But the administration is wrong in claiming that that is in the past and that the Communist regime "now seems committed" to preventing nuclear proliferation.

Beijing has lied before about its nuclear proliferation activities, and it is lying now. Consider: In September 1997, a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Beijing claimed that China "does not advocate, encourage, or engage in nuclear proliferation, nor does it assist other countries in developing nuclear weapons." In October of that year, another spokesman reemphasized: "China has never transferred nuclear weapons or relevant technology to other countries.... China has never done it in the past, we do not do it now, nor will we do it in the future." Yet according to the CIA, China, in the second half of 1996, "was the single most important supplier of equipment and technology for weapons of mass destruction" worldwide. An agency report said that between July and December of 1996 China had become Pakistan's "primary source of nuclear-related equipment and technology...."

That has hardly changed. The same week the administration eyewash quoted above appeared, the Washington Post also reported that Libya's nuclear arms designs--recently examined by investigators--were traced to China, through Pakistan; some documents were even written in Chinese text. In mid-February, Reuters quoted a U.S. official as saying that Washington still believes that Beijing is continuing to assist Saudi Arabia with missiles and Pakistan with nuclear and missile technology. There is pervasive evidence that China essentially created Pakistan's nuclear and ballistic missile programs, supplied Iran's chemical weapons and missile programs, and provided dual-use missile technology to Libya and North Korea.

And China is assisted in this effort by Washington's complicity with Beijing's defense-industrial complex. The U.S. Commerce Department approved the transfer of more than $15 billion worth of strategic American exports to Communist China between 1989 and 1999, with some items going directly to Chinese companies developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, according to the Washington Project on Nuclear Arms Control. Also approved was the transfer of high-speed computers that simulate nuclear explosions and can dramatically improve missile capability.

When it comes to appeasing Communist China, the Bush team picked up where the Clinton administration left off. Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, wrote in Commentary in 2002: "It is a standard condition of U.S. export licenses that a U.S. official must be allowed to verify that a dual-use item has not been diverted from its declared civilian use. In the case of these computers, China has refused to comply: by January 2002, it had rebuffed some 700 U.S. requests for verification. What the Chinese are hiding is indubitably the fact that the next generation of Chinese nuclear warheads is being developed with American equipment." (Emphasis added.) But it is not just the Chinese; the Bush administration does not want this fact to be known either.