Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency release is a Scientific Intelligence Study, TCS No. 4425/65. The Scientific Intelligence Committee prepared it with other intelligence community committees and approved it on 3 June 1965. It assesses Communist China's capabilities in science and technology through 1970, with particular attention to military and industrial programs. The study concludes that China will lag far behind advanced nations. The exceptions are a few priority areas such as nuclear weapons, missiles and air defense. It contains no discussion of UFOs.
G‘ X ‘T r >~ I ‘L 2 . . 1 2 1 -..._.._._»... J 179. The only known U-235 production facility in China is the complex located on the Yellow River near Lan-chou. This facility probably in- cludes a gaseous diffusion plant supplied by the USSR during the 1957 to mid-1960 period. This site layout suggests that original plans included an additional building that would have permitted production by normal gaseous diffusion ' tech- niques of highly enriched uranium. However, a second large building has not been constructed. The “evidence suggests that the first building could have started operation sometime between August 1962 and March 1963. The Chinese apparently were _forced to adopt other methods to achieve highly enriched U-235. Thus, it seems improbable that a completely gaseous diffusion process was used by the Chinese, since they are likely to have used the first nuclear materials available for their first device. 180. We believe that the likeliest source of the Chinese enriched uranium was a combination of processes, where partially enriched uranium pro- duced by the Lan-chou gaseous diffusion plant was further enriched by an unidentified electromagnetic separation facility. 181. A small electromagnetic facility could be 184. Pao-t’0u Plutonium Production Facilities— A highly secure installation, located about 4 nau- tical miles to the northwest of the old city of Pao-t’ou, was identified in March 1963 as probably being a plutonium production facility. On the basis of all available evidence, however, we are not able to establish a firm estimate of the opera- tional status of the reactor. (b)(3) A 37 M3) Approved for Release: 2018/01/30 C00659420 TCS 4425/65(b)(3 b)(1 (b)(1 located within the Lan-chou complex. ((bl)((1 ) Approved for Release: 2018/01/30 C00659420 b 1
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 95 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.