Zhang Aiping, 93; Headed China’s Military, Nuclear Bomb Program

Zhang Aiping, 93, the former defense minister of China who managed the country’s nuclear bomb program, has died in Beijing. The official New China News Agency said Zhang had been ill, but did not report when he died.

Zhang served as defense minister under Deng Xiaoping, who also appointed him head of a commission to modernize the Chinese military.

Under his leadership, China tested its first land-based missile with the range to hit targets in the United States in 1980. In 1981, China launched several satellites from a single vehicle, a key step in the process of developing multi-warhead missiles.

A career soldier, Zhang was born in Sichuan province to a family of landowners. He joined the Communist Youth League when he was 18 and joined the Communist Party in 1928.

After taking part in the Long March, the Red Army’s 7,700-mile trek to escape Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in the mid-1930s, he rose through the ranks, commanding a guerrilla band that rescued U.S. flight crews that crashed in China after the April 1942 bombing raid on Tokyo led by Lt. Col. James Doolittle.

He was accused of counterrevolutionary crimes and stripped of his posts during the Cultural Revolution in 1966-67, but was rehabilitated by Deng and reentered government.