Bang No. 7

In the seventh Chinese atomic test since Peking joined the nuclear club three years ago, the flash of a fireball last week lit up the desert around Lop Nor in northwestern China. It was the first test since last spring, when a Maoist mushroom cloud proved to the world that the Chinese had succeeded in the summa of atomic arts--building a hydrogen bomb. Bang No. 7 was far, far smaller, probably in the Hiroshima-bomb range of 20 kilotons. But it was no less menacing for being a minibang. Unless it was a partial dud--as Peking's unaccustomed silence, led some to believe--its improved miniaturization indicated that China has advanced well along in its countdown toward bombs tidy enough to ride missiles to their targets.

For at least a decade, the nuclear-weapon and missile-development programs have been top-priority items for Peking, and are generously supplied with scarce capital equipment and even scarcer trained manpower. China is rich in the raw materials of the nuclear age, even used to export uranium ore to Russia before the ideological split in 1960. Its gaseous-diffusion plant at Lanchow is estimated to turn out enough U-235 to build some 20 bombs a year, and Peking now has as many as 80 bombs of various kinds in various stages of development. That rate will likely soar sharply: U.S. scientists estimate that Peking will have a stockpile of 100 H-bombs alone by 1970.

The Lure of Profits. The missile program is proceeding apace. The Chinese, who claim to have invented the rocket 700 years ago, already have short-and medium-range (1,500 miles) missiles perfected, and this year are expected to begin building emplacements for the MRBMs along China's coast, thus bringing a large part of Asia within the arc of their nuclear capability. One of the countries sure to be pinpointed on Chinese plotting maps is Japan, which, ironically, continues to supply Chinese buyers with the sophisticated technology that Peking needs for missilery, as in the recent sale of a vacuum furnace and rolling mill for titanium and tantalum rocket metals. Though Japan nominally subscribes to the Western list of goods forbidden for sale to the Communists, the lure of profits with the mainland has proved too great. Japan, in fact, has no investigative and inspection staff for checking on sales to China.

The best estimates are that China will not achieve perfected ICBM capability--and the range to hit the U.S.-- until 1972 or even 1975. Before that day, the Chinese will have to conduct extensive testing of the 5,000-mile missiles, and they have only two directions in which to fire. One is into the Pacific Ocean, where the precedent for testing has been established by other nuclear powers. The other is the Indian Ocean to the southwest.

One of the few countries in the world that China has continued to cultivate scrupulously through the otherwise convulsive xenophobia of the Cultural Revolution is Tanzania on the Indian Ocean's western shore. China has even promised to spend $280 million and send the coolie labor to build a railroad connecting Tanzania and Zambia, a plan that the World Bank rejected as uneconomic. Such generosity might well contain the seeds of a quid pro quo: a Chinese monitoring and tracking station in Tanzania when Mao's rockets are ready to whoosh down the Indian Ocean range.

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