Careful for guilt by association, John. The history of proliferation policy is nutso, of course. Remember the long running yearly certifications that Pakistan, officially, wasn't a proliferation threat?
On China, they got a lot of smart people, and the supercomputers that the bomb labs did all the fancy development on weren't any more powerful than a run-of-the-mill PC these days. Maybe not totally run-of-the-mill, but I've been pricing out a toy "supercomputer" with ~1000 mips, 1 gig memory, 50 gig disk, maybe $3k or so in parts. I'm not sure what year the bomb lab Crays would have hit that level, no earlier than mid-80s I'm sure. The best hope we have for China is that they haven't shown much interest in devoting U.S.- scale resources to defense, much less Soviet-scale.
I wish national interest had a bigger role in our China policy than commercial interests, but that's not the way our government works, unfortunately. There's a funny disconnect here. It may become fashionable to view China as a threat here, but China views us mostly as a market, like Japan before them. Getting a coherent policy out of the current toxic political environment is not likely, I'd say. |
