Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland
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Item Satellites, Security, and Scandal: Understanding the Politics of Export Control(2005-01) Lamb, Robert D.In the pre-dawn hours of 15 February 1996, a Chinese rocket carrying an Intelsat communications satellite tilted off its launch tower during take-off, flew into a hillside village a few miles from Xichang, China, and exploded with a force comparable to 20 tons of TNT. The surviving villagers, jolted out of their sleep by the explosion, soon discovered that more than a hundred of their neighbors had been killed or injured, and that much of their village was destroyed. The People's Republic of China (PRC) tried to cover up the extent of the tragedy, initially claiming that only six people had died. The world learned the truth soon enough. But in the United States, at least, the villagers were quickly forgotten, bit players in a scandal that would soon take the spotlight: An American satellite was destroyed in that blast, and Space Systems/Loral, the company that had built it, was accused of damaging U.S. national security by cooperating illegally with China's launch-failure investigators assistance, some Americans claimed, that the PRC could use to improve its spy satellites and nuclear missiles. It wasn't the first such accusation. Chinese Long March rockets carrying American-made commercial satellites had exploded twice before, in 1992 and 1995; in both of those cases, the satellites had been manufactured by Hughes Space & Communications. In all three launch failures, the satellite makers investigated the causes and, at the urging of the launch-insurance industry, shared technical information with Chinese engineers to help them correct the problems so future launches could be insured. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Loral, Hughes, and Boeing Space Systems (whose parent company, Boeing, acquired Hughes's satellite business in 2000) were investigated by U.S. export officials, found to have shared their engineers' expertise in missile-launch technology with the PRC, and fined tens of millions of dollars for providing unlicensed defense services in violation of U.S. ex-port control laws (see Appendix A: Company backgrounds). During this same period, Boeing was charged with similar violations related to Sea Launch, its satellite-launch joint venture with Russian, Ukrainian, and Norwegian companies.Item Rethinking U.S.-China Security Cooperation(2014-08) Gallagher, NancyThis paper argues that traditional arms control approaches no longer work well for even traditional security problems on the U.S.-Chinese security agenda for three reasons: Firstly, even when both states reason for arms control from the superpowers’ experience during the Cold War, they do so in different ways; secondly, a growing number of experts and policy elite in both countries do not think the benefits of formal arms control outweigh the costs and risks; and thirdly, those who think formal arms control has an important role to play lack a clear and compelling logic for why arms control is durable and achievable among highly interdependent states with unequal power, mixed interests, and dissimilar values. Past attempts find a new basis for U.S.-China security cooperation—e.g., by using voluntary measures or by relying on the economic interdependence of the two states—have proved insufficient. The second half of this paper suggests the basic elements of a cooperative security logic that could be a more appropriate and effective basis for cooperation. Instead of narrowly defining the objective of arms control as increasing deterrence stability at lower cost and risk, this logic aims more broadly to prevent threats from developing, provide reassurance, and promote consensual political order among states. Rather than trying primarily to set equal technical limitations on military capabilities, dialogue and negotiations should seek to ensure that whatever capabilities states have, including asymmetrical and dual-use ones, are used for mutually acceptable purposes and according to equitable behavioral rules. Issues related to transparency, verification, and compliance management would also be handled in ways that promote cooperation rather than competition. The paper concludes by examining how U.S.-Chinese cooperation in space, on nuclear weapons issues (including the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty), and on missile defense all stand to benefit from reliance on this new logic.Item China's Spent Nuclear Fuel Management: Current Practices and Future Strategies(2011-03) Zhou, YunAlthough China’s nuclear power industry is relatively young and the management of its spent nuclear fuel is not yet a concern, China’s commitment to nuclear energy and its rapid pace of development require detailed analyses of its future spent fuel management policies. The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of China’s fuel cycle program and its reprocessing policy, and to suggest strategies for managing its future fuel cycle program. The study is broken into four sections. The first reviews China’s current nuclear fuel cycle program and facilities. The second discusses China’s current spent fuel management methods and the storage capability of China’s 13 operational nuclear power plants. The third estimates China’s total cumulated spent fuel, its required spent fuel storage from present day until 2035, when China expects its first commercialized fast neutron reactors to be operational, and its likely demand for uranium resources. The fourth examines several spent fuel management scenarios for the present period up until 2035; the financial cost and proliferation risk of each scenario is evaluated. The study concludes that China can and should maintain a reprocessing operation to meet its R&D activities before its fast reactor program is further developed.