by Ashish Dangwal at The EurAsian Times
These researchers have then assisted China in making significant strides in military technology, whether hypersonic missiles, submarines, or drones, reported NBC News, citing a private intelligence report.
The report highlighted the government of the PRC’s attempts to nurture its young and talented scientists at US national laboratories and lure the brightest minds back to the country to boost its military projects.
The government of China has allegedly made a concerted effort to send Chinese scientists to Los Alamos National Laboratory, the site of the first nuclear weapons research.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory is a multidisciplinary research facility working on various disciplines, including national security, space exploration, nuclear fusion, and supercomputing.
Between 1987 and 2021, at least 162 scientists who had received scientific training at Los Alamos returned to Beijing to assist with various national research and development (R&D) projects.
There were 15 permanent staff members at Los Alamos, many of whom had extremely high levels of security clearance.
“Of those fifteen, thirteen were recruited into PRC government talent programs; some were responsible for sponsoring visiting scholars and postdoctoral researchers from the PRC, and some received US government funding for sensitive research,” the report added.
These scientists helped the PRC with technology like drones, quiet submarines, hypersonic missiles, and warheads that could penetrate the Earth.
Concerns regarding Chinese access to the United States’s top-secret weapon projects have also been raised. In 1999, the US accused nuclear physicist Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-American who worked at Los Alamos, of giving China the blueprints for the country’s most sophisticated nuclear warhead.
The charges were dropped in 2006 due to the lack of evidence; however, the episode caused considerable uneasiness among the laboratory’s ethnic Chinese scientists.