RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz told ABC News’s Martha Raddatz on March 16^th.

Waltz’s demand was in fact more comprehensive. He said that Iran must also hand over, among other things, missiles and uranium enrichment capability.

China helped Iran possess both. Beijing has set the stage for the next war in the Middle East.

On missiles, there is no doubt where Tehran got its delivery systems. “Most of Iran’s liquid-fueled ballistic missiles, including all its longest-range ones, are North Korean missiles with new paint,” Bruce Bechtol, author of North Korean Military Proliferation in the Middle East and Africa: Enabling Violence and Instability, told Gatestone.

“The missiles are probably why Trump is now dealing with Iran’s nukes.”

And where did North Korea get the technology that it sold to Iran? Some came from China. “The North’s submarine-launched KN-11 looks awfully like China’s Jl-1,” said Bechtol.

Pyongyang could not have sold missiles to Iran — and certainly could not transport them through Chinese airspace — without Beijing’s approval.

On enrichment, China proliferated directly and indirectly.

Indirectly, it proliferated through the nuclear black market ring headed by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. China, sometime around 1974, started helping Pakistan build a nuclear device. As proliferation analysts note, China’s help was crucial, substantial and continuous.

Then, the infamous Khan, known as the father of the Pakistani bomb, merchandised China’s technology, including China’s blueprints for at least one warhead, to various countries across the Middle East and North Africa. Iran was one of Khan’s customers, especially for parts for centrifuges, the machines that purify uranium to bomb-grade. Khan used Chinese military installations to facilitate transfers to Iran.

Apart from transfers through the Khan ring, China directly dealt with the Iranian regime. For instance, a Chinese enterprise, Zheijiang Ouhai Trade Corp., arranged the surreptitious transfer of “critical valves and vacuum gauges” to Iran for use in its uranium enrichment program. Before that, another Chinese entity was involved in the sale to Iran of 108 pressure transducers, instruments that monitor gas centrifuges.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran, the dissident group that in 2002 disclosed the secret nuclear facilities in Arak and Natanz, charged in September 2005 that the covert Chinese trade in centrifuges continued into that year.

China also aided Iran in areas beyond enrichment. In June 2002, for instance, the US State Department publicly noted that China had violated pledges it made in October 1997 to the United States to stop aiding specific Iranian nuclear projects.

In November 2003, the Associated Press reported that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) staff had identified China as one of the probable sources of equipment used in Tehran’s suspected nuclear weapons program. Chinese specialists were working in that program at least as late as fall 2003 according to Michael Ledeen, writing in the Wall Street Journal.

In September 2005, the National Council of Resistance of Iran charged that China had secretly sent Iran beryllium the previous year. This metal, subject to international export controls, is used in neutron initiators to trigger nuclear weapons. The allegation is consistent with other reports about Iran’s covert attempts to source beryllium at that time.

Iran, in short, has a nuclear weapons program because of China. For a long time, the international community looked the other way as the “atomic ayatollahs,” in violation of their treaty obligations, worked on building these fearsome devices. President Donald Trump, to his credit, is taking the issue head on.

Now, the U.S. does not have a choice. As the Heritage Foundation pointed out in an October 2024 report about Iran, “The United States is at a critical juncture.”

“Recently, the U.S. government disclosed that it believes Iran has activated its nuclear weapons program that it previously believed had been discontinued in 2003,” Anthony Celso, a professor of security studies at Angelo State University, told Gatestone.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence in February of last year issued its Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The document included this sentence: “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.”

Fast-forward to July 23, 2024, when ODNI released another report on the topic. The latter report did not include that assessment. From this and other indications, including comments of Senator Lindsey Graham after he received a classified briefing that month, it is clear that the U.S. intelligence community now believes Iran is racing toward the bomb.

Tehran almost certainly has one by now. The Iranians themselves have made that clear. There is only a “one-week gap from the issuance of the order to the first test” of a nuclear bomb, according to an April 2024 public statement of a senior Iran lawmaker.

That boast appears accurate. In the following July, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken essentially corroborated the statement by announcing that “instead of being at least a year away from having the breakout capacity of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon,” Iran was “probably one or two weeks away from doing that.”

In short, Iran then was a bomb-in-the-basement state, just a “couple turns of the screw” from having an actual weapon.

The IAEA in January 2023 discovered that Iran possessed uranium enriched to 83.7% in the underground Fordo facility. There are no peaceful uses for uranium enriched to that purity.

Since then, there have been additional disturbing indications. Last month, for instance, the agency revealed that Iran possessed enough 60%-enriched uranium to make six weapons if that uranium were enriched to 90% purity, which would not be that difficult.

Diplomats from Russia, Iran and China met in Beijing this month to support Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Tehran, bolstered by Beijing and Moscow, publicly said it had no desire to talk to Trump.

There are in fact conversations behind the scenes, but Iran nonetheless would not be as brazen if Beijing were not fully supporting it.

If Waltz is as good as his word — that Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon — then China, by arming the ayatollahs with nukes, has made sure that the world’s next confrontation will be historic.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.