Brothers in Arms (55 page)

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Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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Sino-Soviet cooperation, Soviet leaders believed that it would not be in their interests to give China a forward capacity equaling their own.
Cooperation on Nuclear Science
Nuclear cooperation held a special place in bilateral relations. In March 1956 the Soviet Union, the People's Republic, and nine other socialist countries organized a Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in the small town of Dubna near Moscow. The Soviet Union bore half of the expenses of setting up the institute, while China covered 20 percent. The newly established institute included the nerve centers of Soviet nuclear research, the Institute of Nuclear Research and the Electric and Physical Laboratory of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The laboratories of the Dubna institute were the best Soviet science could offer; they possessed giant accelerating installations for the study of the atomic nucleus, the world's largest synchrophasotron and synchrocyclotron. Chinese scientists had their first real opportunity to do advanced nuclear research at this institute.
Chinese participation in the programs of the Dubna institute was governed by the April 1955 agreement on Soviet assistance to China in carrying out research in nuclear physics and tests of using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. According to the agreement, an experimental atomic reactor and accelerators of elementary particles would be designed and delivered to China in 1955-1956; China also would receive, free of charge, scientific and technical documentation related to the atomic reactor and accelerators and assistance in assembling and activating the reactor. The results of this cooperation materialized very soon. On September 27, 1958, not far from Beijing, China's first experimental nuclear reactor (with a capacity of 10,000 kilowatts) was put into operation together with a cyclotron that provided 24 million electron-volts. Marshal Nie Rongzhen, deputy premier of the PRC State Council, said at the opening of the reactor that putting the reactor and cyclotron into operation enabled Chinese industry and agriculture to develop rapidly and would serve as a productive force.

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The new Chinese government aimed at becoming a nuclear power, with Soviet assistance. While Mao publicly belittled the effect of nuclear weapons, he and other Chinese leaders argued that China needed such weapons to protect itself against imperialist attacks. During the 1950s, Chinese leaders avoided stating that those weapons must never be used and never discussed nuclear doctrines with the Soviet leaders while Sino-Soviet nuclear cooperation was under way.
Quite early during the Sino-Soviet alliance Soviet leaders started to worry about Chinese views on nuclear war. Mao's speech at the second session of the Eighth CCP Congress in 1956 staggered the Soviets. Mao said:

 

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War will be all right. . . . We should not be afraid of war. If there is war, then there will be those who will be killed. . . . I believe that the atomic bomb is not more dangerous than a large sword. If half of humanity is killed during this war, it will not matter. It is not terrible if only one third of the world's population survives.

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The Soviet leaders never seem to have had a clear vision of why China needed nuclear weapons. In the mid-1950s, when the Soviet leaders sought ways to support the CCP's plans for turning China into a socialist state, it seemed that Moscow's assistance to China's own nuclear program would not damage Soviet interests. The 1957 Soviet offer of a sample atomic bomb came at a time when China already had a nuclear program and had started intensive work on nuclear weapons technology. In order to acquire nuclear weapons in the shortest possible time, China made that program a top priority.
By the end of the 1950s, China tried to use the authority of Soviet nuclear weapons to increase its own political weight. This strategy was especially obvious when in May 1958 the Chinese foreign minister, Chen Yi, stressed that China intended to possess nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union supported China during the September-October 1958 crisis over the Taiwan Straits and said that it would not permit an attack on China by the United States and Japan. At the same time, however, Moscow informed Beijing that China could not use threats of Soviet nuclear retaliation to back Chinese political aims in the straits.
The second Taiwan crisis in 1958 led Moscow to reevaluate its attitude toward nuclear-weapon creation in China. Reviewing China's economic potential, Moscow understood that even after the People's Republic created its own nuclear weapons, it would take years for the country to develop a credible nuclear force. Thus, Chinese possession of nuclear weapons would
politically
help to shift the balance of world power in favor of socialism while not threatening Soviet superiority. This attitude did not change until the end of the Sino-Soviet military relationship in the early 1960s, even though Khrushchev started having second thoughts about how outsiders viewed Soviet assistance to Chinese nuclear programs after his visit to Beijing in mid-1958.
In the Soviet-supplied reactor the only known nuclear installation in that country in 1958 China could be expected to extract five kilograms of plutonium by the end of 1960, about the amount necessary to manufacture one bomb. Beijing's dependence on Soviet-manufactured enriched uranium for fuel supply for the reactor was probably why the Chinese started looking for their own sources. The enriched uranium used during China's first nuclear test in October 1964 was a product of the gaseous diffusion plant constructed in Lanzhou in Gansu Province with limited Soviet contribution.
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By the time of the first suc-

 

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cessful Chinese nuclear explosion in 1964, Soviet-Chinese nuclear cooperation had ceased completely.

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Soviet nuclear assistance was withdrawn for three main reasons. First, the Soviet Union, as the only country in the socialist camp to possess nuclear weapons, hesitated to lose that monopoly. Even if there had been no political differences, for Moscow such a development created an unnecessary precedent for polarization between socialist countries. But from 1958-1959 on, Soviet leaders also were worried although they never stated this openly that China, attracted by the prospect of its own regional nuclear hegemony, could use its possession of nuclear weapons to blackmail other countries. By 1960 Moscow even feared that Soviet security problems might emerge if China received technology that allowed it to create an atomic bomb. Thus Moscow tried to minimize the risk that China could harm the Soviet Union or its satellites if political relations turned sour.
Nuclear cooperation was undoubtedly the most sensitive and dangerous part of the Sino-Soviet military relationship. Although getting access even to the most basic documentation of these special programs has proven very difficult, we know enough to make us wonder why Khrushchev and his leadership seemed willing to take the extraordinary risks involved in providing another country with nuclear weapons. After all, the United States was never willing to take such risks with any of its allies in Europe even if Washington accepted and to some degree abetted Great Britain's nuclear weapons program, it never contemplated providing direct assistance in the way the Soviet Union did in China.
Perhaps the most obvious reason why the early Khrushchev leadership was willing to help Beijing to get an atomic bomb was the enthusiasm for socialist construction and technological achievement in Moscow during the mid-1950s. Khrushchev and his close associates believed in the alliance with China in a way that their predecessors never did and in a way that Khrushchev himself later regretted bitterly. During these leaders' first enthusiastic years in power, providing China with nuclear weapons may have seemed a small price to pay for an alliance that would lead two continents into socialism.
Military Cooperation vs. Political Conflict
The 1950s saw very substantial military cooperation between China and the Soviet Union, although few reports of the cooperation reached the open press at the time or have since been reported by historians. In many ways China was dependent on Soviet support to create the foundations of its own armed forces and

 

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defense industries. In the postwar period 265 complete enterprises were built in China with technical assistance from the Soviet Union. Industrial enterprises accounted for 243 of them (91.6 percent). Of these only nine were left unfinished when Sino-Soviet cooperation ended.

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According to the deputy chairman of China's State Planning Committee, Gong Zuoxin, Soviet assistance was involved in about half of all new plants put into operation by the end of 1957.
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According to Russian figures, the Soviet Union assisted China in construction of enterprises for 9.4 billion rubles in export prices, with equipment deliveries amounting to 8.4 billion rubles and technical assistance to 1 billion rubles.
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Thus expenditures on construction of industrial enterprises in China amounted to about 100 billion rubles in Soviet domestic budget terms. Taking into consideration that in 1959, the national income of the Soviet Union totaled approximately 1.3 trillion rubles, construction of enterprises in China accounted for approximately 7 percent of the Soviet annual national income.
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It is possible to look at this figure from another angle. In 1960 Soviet authorities decided to begin construction of small apartments worth up to 35,000 rubles each. For the money invested in constructing industrial enterprises in China, the Soviets could have built about 2.6 million such apartments.
About half of all the equipment delivered from the Soviet Union to China was intended for military enterprises and plants. According to Soviet experts, at the end of the 1950s defense expenses amounted to more than one-quarter of the state budget of the People's Republic 7 billion yuan out of 26.9 billion yuan.
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Defense was the largest area of expenditure in the PRC budget.
During the frosty Sino-Soviet relations in the 1960s and 70s, Soviet media claimed that the People's Republic would not have survived without Moscow's assistance. China, in turn, disparaged the importance of that aid. The existence of two antipolar views on this question hardly favored the improvement of relations between the countries. But it is telling that even during this period, authors in polemical articles published both in China and the Soviet Union evaded the question of past military cooperation. Now we know that this omission was not accidental the military cooperation was too important and too sensitive to figure in the polemics. For the Soviet Union, it was a huge gamble that ultimately failed. For China, it was heritage that proved politically embarrassing but militarily useful as the country took on the role of regional Great Power.
Notes
1. William W. Whitson, ed.,
Military and Political in Power in China in the 1970s
(New York: Praeger, 1972), gives a good overview of early Western studies of the field. Western studies and estimates were, however, limited by a narrow database because of

 

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