By Robert Windrem, NBC News Producer
When the United States learned that it had
inadvertently sent four critical missile warhead components to Taiwan recently, it quickly told Beijing.
It was not just a courtesy. The United States, China and Taiwan have been involved in a dance for nearly 40 years trying to keep the island nation from getting nuclear weapons. If Chinese intelligence had learned of the shipment and believed the components were not shipped inadvertently, it would have no doubt created a crisis of confidence in U.S. assurances that Taiwan will not be permitted to go nuclear.
For 40 years, the U.S. has threatened, cajoled and spied on Taiwanese nuclear programs. The spy story alone says a lot about how high a priority the U.S. has placed on those efforts.
In ordinary circumstances, the 1988 defection of Chang Hsien-y, a colonel in the Taiwanese military, would not have been especially notable, particularly given the number of other defections that occurred during the Cold War. One day, Chang, his wife and their three children simply boarded an airplane at a former U.S. air base in a remote part of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and disappeared into thin air.
Revealed to be a spy
Yet Chang's unauthorized flight was taken with the utmost seriousness by the Taiwanese government, which fired him from his job and issued a warrant for his arrest. It alsoo promised to punish anyone who had anything to do with the incident. The government's consternation arose from the fact that Chang was in the military, a nuclear scientist, and the deputy director of the Nuclear Energy Research Center at the military's Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology. Most galling of all, and humiliating, it became apparent in the days following the 45-year-old scientist's departure that he was also a spy for the CIA for 20 years, having been recruited while a military cadet. During the furor that erupted in Taiwan when Chang's defection became known to the public, one newspaper accused the American spy agency of having committed an "ungentlemanly action." That wasn't the half of it.
Chang's "action" was apparently to provide startling details about the Taiwanese nuclear weapons program, specifically about its 40-Megawatt research reactor at Lung Tan, 20 miles southwest of Taipei. The Lung Tan reactor, the largest of four such reactors in Taiwan, was sold to Taipei by Canada in 1969 and was similar to the one used by India to produce plutonium for its weapons program.
If Taiwan was consternated because of Chang's revolution, the United States was equally consternated because of what amounted to a Taiwanese reprise in its long search for nuclear weapons. It had all been played before. Looking across the 90-mile wide Taiwan Strait at a sworn enemy that had a four-million-man army, nuclear weapons, and fixation about "liberating" their island, Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang colleagues had decided at least as early as the mid-1960's that they had better acquire their own nuclear arsenal as a counterforce.
Taipei therefore asked the U.S. for a reprocessing plant in 1969 and was turned down by the Nixon administration. Besides the obvious wish to limit nuclear weapon proliferation for its own sake, the U.S. was also mindful of warnings from the People's Republic of China that it would invade Taiwan if the latter acquired nuclear weapons. Having to abandon China – the jewel of the Nixon administration's foreign policy – to support Taiwan against an invasion by the PLA would have been Nixon and Henry Kissinger's worst nightmare.
The Nationalists then did what everybody else seemed to be doing: They turned to France. An agreement was soon worked out in which Saint-Gobain Techniques Nouvelle would provide a plant that could reprocess 100 tons of used reactor fuel a year. But the Nixon White House quickly killed that deal, infuriating the French in the process, by threatening to cut off military and economic aid. Yet the Taiwanese were persistent. The CIA said in its September 1974 assessment that Taiwan was conducting a "small nuclear program with a weapon option clearly in mind; and it will be in a position to fabricate a nuclear device after five years or so."
In June 1976, IAEA inspectors visiting a Taiwanese research reactor found that ten barrels of used fuel containing 500 grams (one pound) of plutonium was missing. Two months later, U.S. government officials told The Washington Post that intelligence indicated that Taiwan had been secretly reprocessing nuclear fuel into weapons-grade plutonium for some time. The leak was the prelude to another crackdown.
No letting down
Washington was so determined to keep nuclear weapons out of Taiwan's hands that it forced the Taiwanese to dismantle some of their equipment and return much of the rest to the U.S., where it came from. It also extracted a pledge from Taiwan that research in any area having nuclear weapons implications would be abandoned. "After the Americans got through with us," one Taiwanese scientist remarked at the time, "we wouldn’t have even been able to teach physics here on Taiwan."
Its pledge notwithstanding, Taiwan had apparently accumulated enough plutonium-bearing spent fuel from the Lung Tan reactor by 1988 for more than 10 weapons. It was also making a secret reprocessing facility and had even begun shaping bomb cores. Colonel Chang undoubtedly passed on information about the spent fuel and the secret facility to the CIA. That February – the month after the colonel arrived in the U.S. and was "debriefed” – the delegation from the Department of State went to Taipei and extracted another pledge: that the research reactor would be shut down once and for all and work on the reprocessing facility would end.
Not everyone believes that the program is over. Taiwanese government officials, as high as the president, have hinted that while the country is not actively pursuing nuclear weapons, it could manufacture them.
In 1996, as China threatened Taiwan with missiles, Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan's president, restated that Taiwan "has the ability" to build a nuclear weapon "but definitely will not."
But this time, it was Taiwan who came clean – and the United States who fumbled the issue.
Pentagon officials tell NBC News that Taiwan notified the United States in early 2007 that they had been sent potentially hazardous material instead of the helicopter batteries they had ordered, but it took the military and the Pentagon more than a year to respond.
E-mail traffic between the United States and Taiwan shows that the Pentagon recommended they just "destroy" the incorrect shipment, but the Taiwanese refused because the shipment was marked "EXPLOSIVES."
When officials in the Pentagon learned about this last week, it took only a matter of days before the nuclear fuses were recovered and returned to the United States.
NBC's Jim Miklaszewski contributed to this report.
Much of the information in this report was derived from "Critical Mass, the Dangerous Races for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World," of which Windrem was co-author.
