A new report has brought forth shocking news about China’s espionage plot at a US weapons and nuclear lab as they keep swaying key senior experts from the United States.
According to a devastating assessment, Beijing recruited senior experts from a renowned American nuclear laboratory in a decades-long scheme to advance its own military.
Republicans in Congress have now called for a probe into the claims that between 1987 and 2021, at least 162 scientists who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico went back to China to “assist a variety of domestic research and development activities.”
According to the report, the bulk of the scientists came from China and were participants of professional growth and scholarship programmes supported by Beijing.
It is the most frightening development to date that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to gain more sway in the United States. In addition, the GOP has called for supervision of China’s acquisition of farms near North Dakota military installations.
The former US-based scientists are rumoured to have focused on weapons research among other things since returning to China.
Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida led a letter to the Biden administration that shed additional light on the most recent Strider Technologies findings.
The Communist Party in power in China, according to Waltz’s letter on Wednesday, targets “seemingly innocuous key civilian technologies, acquires them illicitly, and exploits the “dual-use” potential of these technologies to build up their military capabilities.”
“The Chinese domestic programs that former Los Alamos members worked on also included work on weapons development and research in cutting-edge military technologies,” the Florida Republican wrote.
According to the report, they went back to China to work on weapons development projects and contribute to research on cutting-edge military and dual-use technologies, including deep-earth penetrating warheads, unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs), hypersonics, jet engines, and submarine noise reduction.
Waltz emphasised the “critical role” labs like Los Alamos play in maintaining the US as a global leader in science and the creation of clean energy.
‘Beijing has been successful at stealing and capitalising on our research and development,’ he claimed, citing the alarming study.
“As a result, these malign talent recruitment programs have now resulted in a tangible national security threat to the United States,” he said.
Ten House Republicans on the Science, Space and Technology Committee co-signed the letter, which was addressed to Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as well as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
To “resolve national security challenges through simultaneous excellence,” according to Los Alamos, is the organization’s stated objective.
Strider Technologies claims that “at least one” former employee of the lab who has since left to work for China had access to top-secret sensitive information since they had a Q-level clearance from Granholm’s office.
But there was controversy about Los Alamos long before the shocking report.
The Inspector General for the Energy Department called attention to administrative failings that resulted in inappropriate data handling and flaws in its “corrective action” procedures in 2015.
The key nuclear lab also had to halt work on all of its secret projects in 2004 after realising that crucial information was missing from two of its hard discs.
That occurred five years prior to Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos scientist, being charged with stealing US nuclear secrets on behalf of China.
Due to insufficient evidence being found by the federal government to support the numerous charges, 58 of the 59 counts brought against him were ultimately dismissed.
In an accord with prosecutors, Lee ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of handling confidential data improperly.
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