Soviet policy toward China: Developing nuclear weapons 1949–1969

The year 1999 has seen increasingly heated debates regarding the issue of alleged Chinese nuclear espionage in the United States. These debates focus on the issue of whether the Chinese simply outsmarted the US government, or whether the Clinton administration or its representatives deliberately leaked classified information on nuclear weapons and missile technology to the Chinese government or its agents. As context, it may be both timely and useful to examine what history has to tell us about such cases in the past. If this is so, then no case has been more extensive, appropriate, and illustrative of this process than the one involving Chinese‐Soviet nuclear cooperation, which extended from the end of the 1940s to the early 1960s. If this case is apropos, then the central questions are, ‘What nuclear secrets, if any, did the Chinese steal from the Soviets?’ and ‘What secrets, if any, did the Soviet Union itself transfer to China?’ These and other relevant issues are the central focus of this article.