U.S. Scuttles China-Iran Arms Dealings

Weeks after winning a Chinese pledge to halt assistance to Iran’s nuclear programs, the Clinton administration discovered and protested secret negotiations between the two governments for hundreds of tons of material used in enriching uranium to weapons grade, according to officials with access to U.S. intelligence.

A series of top-level contacts between the U.S. and Chinese governments last month appears to have put a stop to the transaction. Administration officials said they now are confident that the China Nuclear Energy Industry Corp. in Beijing will not deliver the chemical at issue, anhydrous hydrogen fluoride, to the Isfahan Nuclear Research Center in central Iran, a principal site of Iranian efforts to manufacture the explosive core of an atomic device.

But the episode cast doubt on China’s intentions as it moves gingerly toward arms control restraints that it resisted for decades. Those new restraints, along with written pledges made at October’s summit between President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin, allowed the Clinton administration to resuscitate a dormant 1985 agreement that could enable U.S. firms to sell hundreds of millions of dollars of nuclear reactors to China.