Again always a Western source of knowledge behind every Chinese advance.
Not tension...more like $1 million salaries to leave.
More than 160 Chinese scientists who worked at Los Alamos returned home, including one given grants worth $20 million by the US for research
www.telegraph.co.uk
Scores of Chinese scientists who worked at one of America's most advanced weapons labs have been recruited by Beijing to help develop hypersonic technology, deep-penetrating warheads, drones, stealth camouflage and quiet submarines.
Some 162 Chinese scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the US birthplace of the atomic bomb, went back to China as late as last year to work on futuristic programmes with potential military applications, according to a new report.
Republicans demanded an end to the "espionage" as party members called on the Biden administration to launch an investigation into Beijing's "malign" efforts.
The report came on the eve of the
Chinese Community Party's National Congress, at which Xi Jinping is expected to cement power by receiving an unprecedented third term as president.
It also reflected intensifying concerns in Washington about the scale of China's long-term campaign to steal US research to boost its own military capabilities.
The White House said on Monday that President Xi Jinping was leading China in a more "aggressive" direction.
"We've seen a very different China emerge in recent years under Xi Jinping's leadership," Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, warned.
Details of the movements of scientists from Los Alamos to China were set out in an exhaustive report by Strider Technologies, a private intelligence firm.
The Chinese scientists who worked at Los Alamos between 1987 and 2021 went back to China to work on "domestic research and development programmes", including "dual-use" technology which could have civilian or military applications.
It says the scientists were paid up to $1 million in salaries and research subsidies by the Chinese Communist Party for joining its talent programmes.
Eighty per cent of those who came back to China were recruited into government-sponsored talent systems, including 59 who joined the high-profile "Thousand Talents Programme" (TTP).
So many Chinese scientists, postdoctoral researchers and visiting scholars passed through the laboratory that they have been dubbed the "Los Alamos Club".
Los Alamos was at the heart of the Manhattan Project, which developed and tested the first nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
While much of the work done there today is not classified its role still includes designing nuclear warheads, and ensuring the safety and effectiveness of the US nuclear stockpile.
That includes B61 gravity bombs, the W78 thermonuclear warheads carried by Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the W76 and W88 nuclear warheads positioned on the US Navy’s Trident missile submarines.
The Strider report described how one Chinese scientist was given grants of nearly $20 million by the US government to pursue sensitive research at Los Alamos.
He worked on "Nanostructured Superhard Noses for Deep-Penetrating Warheads".
The scientist had "Q" security clearance, giving access to Top Secret Restricted Data, but later returned to China and joined the TTP.
Another worked at Los Alamos before returning to China and filing a patent there for an "ultra-thick penetrating warhead".
Report author Greg Levesque told the Telegraph: "Nothing about it is ad hoc. What the Chinese government has set up is a system. That system is built to incentivise folks to make those decisions to go to the US, go to the UK, study, learn, and then there are financial and reputational benefits to actually going back [to China].
"They have a name for the system, it's the talent superpower strategy. That system includes not only recruiting talent, but also sending emerging talent overseas."
Mr Levesque said he was "blown away" by how many Los Alamos scientists returning to China were recruited.
"It was not a couple, it was the vast majority," he said. "What we have on our hands here is a nation state that is literally targeting national labs, and they're sending people and recruiting people from those institutions. That's a national security threat.
"If this is happening at Los Alamos what's happening at university research institutions, what's happening at facilities of our allies?"
According to the report, at least seven Los Alamos returnees have links to the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP), which is the "primary research and development, and production, facility for the PRC’s [Peoples Republic of China's] nuclear weapons programme".
One researcher received $1.8 million from the US military while, at the same time, doing work for the Chinese Army.
The report also described how more than a dozen Chinese scientists from Los Alamos later went to the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen, known as "China’s Stanford".
"For a relatively new institution, it employs a disproportionately high number of world-class scholars, most of whom were recruited via PRC government talent programmes," the report noted.
Mike Waltz, a Republican congressman, who represents Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's former seat, called for an investigation into the "Los Alamos Club".
Mr Waltz, the first Green Beret to serve in Congress, said: "The Chinese Communist Party has been stealing our research and technology for decades through its foreign talents programmess and it’s critical to our national security that we put an immediate stop to their espionage efforts."
In a letter signed by other Republicans, Mr Waltz said: "These malign talent recruitment programmes have now resulted in a tangible national security threat to the United States."
In 2019, the US Department of Energy, which has responsibility for Los Alamos, banned its personnel from engaging with Chinese talent recruitment programmes.
But a US Senate homeland security report later that year suggested damage had already been done.
It warned that China had spent the previous 20 years "recruiting US-based researchers, scientists, and experts in the public and private sector to provide China with knowledge and intellectual capital in exchange for monetary gain and other benefits".
In a speech the following year, Christopher Wray, the FBI Director, said: "We cannot close our eyes and ears to what China is doing. To put it bluntly, American taxpayers are effectively footing the bill for China’s own technological development."
According to the FBI, the Thousand Talents and other recruitment programmes "incentivise members to steal foreign technologies" including nuclear energy, wind tunnel design, and advanced lasers.
As the US cracked down, in 2020, Turab Lookman, 68, a Los Alamos scientist for two decades, was sentenced to five years probation.
He pleaded guilty to making a false statement to a counterintelligence officer about his involvement with Thousand Talents.
Mr Levesque, the report author, said China benefited from the West's "collaborative" view over decades.
"Since the 70s the whole manta has been collaborative. That was very one-sided. The Chinese view was it's an open door so let's just go grab it," he said.
"We view it as open scientific collaboration, they view it as a talent war, how do we train up and build our talent base so we can then dominate in the industries we've targeted for our country's advancements."
That meant in programmes which took the US decades, and billions of dollars, to build China had somehow been able to "leapfrog".
The incentives Beijing was offering to returning scientists could be much more than $1 million, he said.
"You can get that just by being inducted into the talent programme, then you get a lab set up, then your lab will get funding.
"What we're seeing across the board is that this whole life cycle isn't really being evaluated or monitored in any kind of way.
"So a lot of those people still have contacts back to Los Alamos, their colleagues, and creating those additional channels for information flow that creates a lot of national security risks."
A US Department of Energy statement said: "In response to growing research security threats, the Department of Energy has taken significant steps in recent years, including the adoption of rigorous vetting, counterintelligence reviews, and restrictions on participation in foreign talent programmes."
