The story of U.S.-China nuclear engagement illustrates how regular science and know-how diplomacy profit each nations in addition to international safety.
BY YANLIANG PAN
An aerial view of working Westinghouse AP1000 models and CAP1000 models (the Chinese model of Westinghouse’s AP1000) underneath building on the Haiyang Nuclear Power Plant within the Shandong province of China, 2024.
WPTO
The United States is locked in a nuclear power race in opposition to Russia and China—a race to regulate superior nuclear applied sciences, markets, and provide chains; assert power dominance within the period of revolutionizing synthetic intelligence; and keep international nuclear security, safety, and nonproliferation norms. Or so goes the prevailing narrative.
It is true that the United States urgently must make its nuclear business extra aggressive than it’s right this moment. Russia is dominating international civil nuclear exports. China is ready to overhaul the U.S. in nuclear power capability by 2030. For all of the discuss in America about superior and small modular reactors, China is forward in really constructing them. In brief, the competitors is actual. It is in no way, nonetheless, the entire story.
For almost half a century following President Richard Nixon’s 1972 go to, the United States and China cooperated, relatively than competed, in nuclear know-how and science—from elementary nuclear and high-energy physics to fission and fusion.
The United States helped lay the muse of China’s nuclear security, safety, and nonproliferation governance. To at the present time, U.S. know-how permeates China’s standard and superior reactors—know-how China acquired not by means of theft however by means of formal collaboration with U.S. corporations and nationwide laboratories underneath the Department of Energy (DOE).
What’s extra, there was a time when China’s nuclear weapon institution welcomed U.S. entry to its most delicate amenities for safety, nonproliferation, and arms management collaboration.
Barring brief episodes of friction, the story of U.S.-China nuclear engagement is one which illustrates how regular science and know-how diplomacy may gain advantage each nations in addition to international safety.
Early Cooperation
The story started in November 1972, when the director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Wolfgang Panofsky, obtained a Chinese scientist by the title of Zhang Wenyu, the director of Beijing’s Institute of Atomic Energy. The institute had contributed vital analysis, parts, and fissile materials feedstock to China’s nuclear weapon program within the Fifties and Sixties. Zhang, nonetheless, was pursuing a special mission as he visited SLAC.
President Nixon’s February 1972 go to to China had opened the door to bilateral scientific exchanges. In September 1972, Zhang obtained a directive from Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai to arrange China’s nationwide scientific program in high-energy physics. His go to to the United States simply two months later was aimed toward establishing scientific exchanges vital to China’s nascent high-energy physics endeavor.
From 1973 onward, Chinese scientists repeatedly visited U.S. nationwide laboratories and leveraged U.S. assist in conducting primary scientific analysis whereas designing the big particle accelerator that will jump-start China’s experimental high-energy physics program. Panofsky supplied vital enter and was invited to hitch Chinese chief Deng Xiaoping on the accelerator’s groundbreaking ceremony in Beijing. He would later turn into an necessary U.S. participant in Track 1.5 and Track 2 nuclear diplomacy with China.
U.S.-China Exchanges
In 1979 casual U.S.-China scientific exchanges culminated within the Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technology—the primary main settlement between the 2 governments following the institution of formal diplomatic relations. Through successive implementing accords, cooperation underneath the settlement expanded from high-energy physics to magnetic fusion, and from nuclear physics to security, safety, nonproliferation, and power sciences.
Exchanges, whereas civilian-focused, spawned relationships between the 2 nations’ senior nuclear weapon scientists. Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Harold Agnew recollects assembly the deputy head of China’s nuclear weapon program in 1979, when the latter visited the United States with a Chinese Nuclear Society delegation.
A separate delegation that visited Los Alamos the earlier yr included a Chinese nuclear physicist by the title of Yang Fujia, who later organized for scientists and intelligence workers from the U.S. weapons lab and DOE to go to almost all of China’s nuclear weapon amenities, from analysis reactors deep within the mountains of Sichuan to the northwestern Lop Nur take a look at web site. The info they gathered in regards to the geology and depth of the Chinese testing tunnels would later permit the United States to extra exactly estimate the yields of China’s nuclear weapons.
For all of the discuss in America about superior and small modular reactors, China is forward in really constructing them.
In return, the Americans supplied their information in fissile materials accounting and management, in addition to arms management monitoring and verification. The Nineteen Nineties lab-to-lab alternate program spearheaded by then–Los Alamos director Siegfried Hecker aimed to assist maintain Chinese weapons safe whereas reinforcing the nation’s integration into the worldwide nonproliferation and disarmament system.
China had been intensely skeptical of this method previous to U.S. engagement. Celebrating its first atomic bomb take a look at in 1964, Beijing dismissed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty ratified by the United States, United Kingdom, and USSR the earlier yr as “a big fraud to fool the people of the world” and “consolidate [their] nuclear monopoly.” Defying nonproliferation restrictions, China made nuclear transfers to nations outdoors the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards regime.
This continued till the United States satisfied China, by way of diplomatic engagement, to embrace nonproliferation and export controls. In 1981 the United States started serving to China construct up its civilian nuclear security regulatory capability almost from scratch. At the identical time, diplomats started negotiating a bilateral settlement on the peaceable makes use of of nuclear power.
Paving the Way for Business
To fulfill U.S. circumstances on a peaceable use settlement and on civil nuclear commerce, senior Chinese leaders dedicated their nation to nonproliferation in precept. In 1984 China grew to become a member of the IAEA. That similar yr, the DOE, with State Department assist, started extending help to China in nuclear safety and nonproliferation safeguards.
By the late Eighties, Chinese security and safety specialists have been spending months, if not years, on coaching and analysis assignments on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and nationwide laboratories. When they returned and took up senior posts in China’s civil nuclear institution, they introduced again and applied U.S. nuclear security, safety, and safeguards practices. It was with U.S. inducement and help that China applied voluntary safeguards preparations with the IAEA, acceded to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), ceased its unsafeguarded nuclear transfers, and have become a member of multilateral export management regimes.
In 1996, when info surfaced about China National Nuclear Corporation’s unauthorized sale of ring magnets to Pakistan, Washington insisted that Beijing implement extra strong export controls on nuclear and dual-use gadgets as a precondition for permitting U.S. corporations to have interaction in civil nuclear commerce with China. In the years that adopted, U.S. specialists suggested China on its nuclear and dual-use export management rules and supplied enforcement coaching.
Nonproliferation diplomacy opened the door to civil nuclear commerce. In the a long time following the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, U.S. civil nuclear building all however floor to a halt amid market and regulatory challenges. As authorized obstacles to civil nuclear commerce with China have been lifted, U.S.-based Westinghouse rushed to safe Chinese orders for its first-of-a-kind AP1000 reactor, which it had not had success advertising and marketing elsewhere.
In 2006 the U.S. authorities endorsed the reactor sale and know-how switch deal, thus making China the primary nation to assemble the AP1000. Lessons discovered from Chinese licensing and building of the AP1000 knowledgeable the U.S. venture on the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Burke County, Georgia. The two models that have been accomplished there in 2024, 15 years after their building was accredited and with tens of billions of {dollars} in value overruns, stay the one AP1000 models to function outdoors China. Today, China operates extra models of the U.S. AP1000 than some other nation on the planet—together with the United States.
There has additionally been cooperation in superior reactors. After the decision of lingering export management points within the early 2000s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology grew to become the primary U.S. entity to obtain DOE authorization to collaborate with China over nuclear know-how—particularly, the know-how of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors.
When the George W. Bush administration introduced its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership in 2006, China grew to become one of essentially the most keen members. Its Institute of Atomic Energy, which had been conducting civilian analysis because the Seventies, engaged nationwide laboratories underneath the U.S. DOE inside a bilateral motion plan to advance quick reactor and gas cycle applied sciences. Cooperation prolonged far past the Bush administration.
In 2014 the Chinese institute made its experimental quick reactor accessible to DOE for joint materials testing. Meanwhile, the Chinese Academy of Sciences carried out joint analysis with Oak Ridge National Laboratory in molten-salt reactors and with Idaho National Laboratory in hybrid power programs. In 2015 Bill Gates’ superior reactor firm, TerraPower, signed an settlement with China National Nuclear Corporation to assemble its first touring wave reactor in China. That, nonetheless, was not meant to be. In simply three years, the U.S. authorities’s restrictions on civil nuclear cooperation with China terminated this partnership and others prefer it.
The Relationship Today
In 2018 the U.S. administration closely restricted civil nuclear exports to China, citing know-how theft and army diversion considerations and channeling a brand new strategic outlook of “great-power rivalry.” According to the U.S. Justice Department, Chinese hackers had gained unlawful entry to Westinghouse know-how and inside info in parallel with the negotiation of authorized know-how switch. In 2016 China General Nuclear, a Chinese state-owned nuclear firm, was indicted for buying U.S. nuclear know-how outdoors U.S. legislation and the U.S.-China civil nuclear cooperation framework.
These fees have been intertwined with considerations that China would profit militarily from U.S. civil nuclear applied sciences, whether or not legally or illegally obtained. At the time of the indictment, China General Nuclear was creating floating nuclear energy crops that Washington believed may give the Chinese army a bonus within the East and South China Seas. There have been additionally long-standing considerations that China might divert U.S. energy reactor applied sciences towards naval propulsion or use civil nuclear infrastructure to provide fissile materials for weapons. Amid China’s nuclear and traditional army buildup in addition to broader U.S.-China strategic rivalry, these considerations started to outweigh the perceived advantages of continued nuclear cooperation. Washington’s 2018 coverage shift was partly a mirrored image of this new actuality.
Nonproliferation diplomacy opened the door to civil nuclear commerce.
Since then, rivalry has overshadowed the 2 nations’ lengthy historical past of partnership in nuclear power and nonproliferation. Export controls—an space during which the 2 nations used to cooperate with a purpose to mitigate regional proliferation threats—have turn into an avenue of geopolitical and technological competitors. The United States has added an growing quantity of Chinese entities to its export management lists. In response, China is leveraging its dual-use export management system to threaten uncommon earth restrictions on the United States. Few do not forget that China arrange the system within the Nineteen Nineties underneath U.S. diplomatic strain and with U.S. technical assist.
In November 2025, the Chinese Academy of Sciences introduced that its prototype molten-salt reactor efficiently demonstrated the conversion of thorium to uranium—a step that might lengthen accessible uranium assets. Commentaries relating to China’s thorium accomplishment hint the molten-salt idea to Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s pioneering work greater than 50 years in the past but hardly ever spotlight the rather more current U.S.-China collaboration.
The lengthy historical past of U.S.-China civil nuclear cooperation shouldn’t be forgotten. Nor ought to it’s lowered, as in some simplistic narratives, to a narrative of China stealing U.S. IP to race forward in civil nuclear applied sciences. The actual story is rather more complicated: The United States and China have engaged in reputable and mutually useful civil nuclear cooperation whereas navigating actual IP safety challenges and army diversion dangers.
If China finally ends up profitable the nuclear power race, the United States ought to declare no small credit score. China has benefited immensely from cooperation with the United States throughout nuclear power applied sciences, security, safety, nonproliferation, export controls, and diplomacy—many diplomats within the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Department of Arms Control have been skilled within the United States. But the profit was not unilateral.
U.S. nuclear engagement with China over the a long time has benefited American public pursuits—by bringing China into the worldwide nonproliferation regime, giving the U.S. nuclear business entry to the Chinese market, enabling China’s transition to scrub power applied sciences, and enhancing the protection of Chinese nuclear energy crops within the perception {that a} nuclear accident wherever is a nuclear accident all over the place.
The United States is safer when Beijing maintains full management of its nuclear arsenal and fissile materials and isn’t inadvertently aiding weapons proliferation as a consequence of lax dual-use export controls. Equally considerably, science and know-how diplomacy has constructed political bridges because the normalization of diplomatic relations in 1979 and has since given the United States transparency and entry to China’s civil and protection nuclear complicated.
Ultimately, the United States by no means misplaced sight of its pursuits. Cooperation has by no means merely been for cooperation’s sake. The United States may gain advantage farther from a revived, but cautious, civil nuclear partnership with China that takes IP and dual-use considerations critically. The partnership might focus, as an example, on precommercial applied sciences the place IP sensitivities are mitigated and potential army utility is proscribed. If U.S. policymakers resolve to droop the body of competitors, at the very least within the civil nuclear area, there may be but the chance to revive and reap the residual goodwill from a half century of cooperation.
Yanliang Pan is a analysis affiliate on the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, the place his work focuses on nuclear power, nuclear provide, worldwide nuclear cooperation, and rising know-how points.
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