Word: arsenals
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...once Washington threw open the doors 20 years ago, a lot of Chinese exploited this country's freedom to soak up material from unclassified publications, study at the best universities, download technical reports from the Net. Beijing skillfully stitched the tidbits together into the rudiments of a new nuclear arsenal. The high-tech revolution here has moved cutting-edge military information into the civilian mainstream, making a lot of dangerous know-how available to potential enemies. That's the price of the free flow of information in an open society...
...three decades, you could do worse than start in China with the People's Liberation Army. China's military today is so outdated that much of its equipment might well have seen action in the Korean War, and many of its troops are semiliterate. The country's strategic nuclear arsenal is 300 times as small as that of the U.S. The entire arsenal packs about as much explosive power as what the U.S. stuffs into one Trident submarine. China's ballistic-missile sub (singular, not plural) hasn't been to sea for a year and would be sunk in minutes...
...legitimate player on the international stage, a nation fully in control of its own military destiny. So, as its entrepreneurs have embraced StarTacs and Yahoo!, Beijing's generals now want to trade their antique weaponry and cold war tactics for the PlayStation power they see in NATO's arsenal...
...national-security nabobs, China will have a new and improved generation of nuclear weapons, all thanks to Bill Clinton, Loral and Wen Ho Lee. And all the Pentagon will have to do is cross out USSR and write in PRC -- and aim everything in the arsenal a little to the right...
...this point, we're in a race with ourselves," says Thompson. "China has never desired to have a state-of-the-art nuclear arsenal -- otherwise they wouldn't be so far behind everybody else." Maybe now, says Thompson, they've caught up by a few years -- in 2002, they'll be in the 1970s, and in another decade or two they'll be where the U.S. is today. He's got a worst-case scenario, too: "The Chinese put a nuclear missile in a freighter, sail it up the Potomac, and blow it up. Who's going to care whether...