Wes Vernon
Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2003

The China-North Korea trail is an established fact, not speculation. The continued nuclear partnership between the two Communist nations is fully documented by Thomas Woodrow, a onetime senior China analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Writing in a study prepared for the Jamestown Foundation, he says, "The transfer and sale of Chinese-origin nuclear weapons and missile technologies has started a spiraling cycle of proliferation with grave consequences for security in South and East Asia."

Furthermore, the study informs us, China has "long historical links" with North Korea's missile programs. China itself has described its relations with North Korea's Stalinist state as "closer than gums with teeth." Not exactly credentials for a disinterested mediator or host.

NewsMax.com recently ran a series of reports focusing on the barbaric inhumane slavery in China that Americans are unwittingly funding through "normal" U.S. trade agreements with Beijing. These have been exposed by dissident Harry Wu in his book, "Troublemaker," published by NewsMax.com.

China has used the money derived from that unsavory trade to fund a current deadly threat to U.S. security -- the hard-line Stalinist state of North Korea. The Jamestown study details this, point by point.

In the 1970's, North Korea received Chinese missile technology of Soviet design. Further, Pyonyang benefited big time from a joint Chinese-North Korean development of the Chinese DF-61, a 1,000 km range nuclear missile. The assistance from the Chinese helped Pyonyang reverse-engineer a version of the Scud missile that it had purchased from Egypt in 1976.

Conduit for Missiles

It was North Korea that served as a conduit for Chinese transfers of Silkworm anti-ship missiles to Iran in the late 1980's. The purpose was to avoid a U.S. censure of Beijing during the period that China was playing both sides of the fence in the Cold War against what Ronald Reagan aptly named "the Evil Empire." One 1988 transfer reportedly included eighty Chinese Silkworms and forty North Korean Scud-B's as part of the same shipment.

The Jamestown Foundation cites reports that in 1997 a joint team of Chinese and North Korean missiles and Chinese missile technicians that was sent to Iran to assist in Tehran's ballistic missile efforts. One result of that joint effort by the two Communist nations was the emergence of the Shahab-3 and Shahab-4 missiles.

North Korea had ample opportunity and likely did use the Iranian missile tests for its own missile program development. In so doing, North Korea technically circumvented North Korea's "promise" not to conduct missile launches. A gullible Jimmy Carter and security tone-deaf Clinton administration were all too willing to accept Pyongyang's "promise."

Other evidence of Chinese assistance to the North Korean missile programs include the following: