Not only is it the number one threat to US national security, but to improve its military capability, the People's Republic of China (PRC) is recruiting US scientists right under our noses. According to a recently published report by Strider Technologies, our US government's Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico is treating the PRC to a smorgasbord of some of America’s most sensitive scientific technologies – and the scientists to go with them.
"Between 1987 and 2021, at least 162 scientists who had worked at Los Alamos returned to the PRC to support a variety of domestic research and development (R&D) programs,” the Strider researchers reported. “Fifteen of those scientists worked as permanent staff members at Los Alamos.” LANL is one of 42 Federally Funded Research and Development Centers. With the welcome mat out for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Los Alamos National Laboratory has become the training ground for PRC scientists engaged in extremely sensitive technologies. Remember, Los Alamos is the home of US nuclear research and technological development, and the Chinese workers there have taken advantage of the lab's research results.
PRC Nuclear Program Benefits from China Recruits
The "Los Alamos Club," as the Strider report calls the Chinese scientists who spent time at Los Alamos and returned to the PRC to ply their acquired knowledge, are involved in a host of CCP military projects. Referring to the Club alumni, Greg Levesque, the lead researcher and author of the Strider analysis, wrote, "At least seven have ties to the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics, the primary R&D and production facility for the PRC's nuclear weapons program.” The Chinese postdoctoral students and staff making up the Los Alamos Club are not individuals seeking a personal education in highly technical fields of study. Instead, they are part of an organized People's Liberation Army (PLA) and CCP program to exploit the technology advances of the US primarily, but other scientifically advanced western countries as well.
"The report, by Strider Technologies, describes what it calls a systemic effort by the government of China to place Chinese scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons were first developed,” says a article from NBC News, who broke the story The organized and structured plan is called the "Thousand Talents Program" (TTP). Implementing the program, the PRC identified scientific disciplines critical to crucial military and scientific research areas in approximately 470 specific talent programs designed to recruit "top talent" targeted at overseas institutions like Los Alamos.
What makes the Chinese overseas education TTP unique is the "each one, teach one" aspect. NBC News explains, "Overseas applicants who are inducted into a PRC talent program are typically contractually obligated (often unbeknownst to their overseas host institution) to host visiting scholars and postdoctoral researchers from the PRC and train them in their area of expertise.” According to the Strider analysis, these PLA affiliated Los Alamos staff and postdoctoral researchers work in the field of "cutting-edge military and dual-use technologies like deep-earth penetrating warheads, unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs), hypersonics, jet engines, and submarine noise reduction.” What this means is the surprise launch of a previously unknown advanced hypersonic missile by the PRC in August 2021, which created alarm among US Defense Department leaders, might easily have been the work of Chinese scientists using technology acquired at Los Alamos.
We’ve Known All Along
(Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
More troubling is that the leakage of US technology to the PRC is not a new problem. In 2019, the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs produced a report called "Threats to the US Research Enterprise: China's Talent Recruitment Plans." It contained a very clear warning regarding the PRC’s recruiting practices. China is exploiting America's open education and research institutions. "China unfairly uses the American research and expertise it obtains for its own economic and military gain,” the Senate subcommittee explained. “This report exposes how American taxpayer-funded research has contributed to China's global rise over the last 20 years.”
The flood of US technological know-how to the CCP didn't happen by accident. There was a naïve belief America was gaining some benefit from having Chinese citizens working in our most sensitive scientific laboratories. "We have benefited enormously from the inflow of Chinese talent," Robert Daly, a China scholar at the Wilson Center, told NBC. "It's essential to the United States." Most would submit that whatever benefit might accrue from Chinese technology thieves being in US scientific institutions pales in comparison to the great harm to US national security. "The Chinese government tries to entice scientists to secretly bring our knowledge and innovation back to China,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told a Hudson Institute audience in 2020, “even if that means stealing proprietary information or violating our export controls and conflict-of-interest rules.”
Will the US ever stop the technology and scientific knowledge hemorrhaging to America’s number one national security threat and leave the Chinese to develop their own technological and military capability without US taxpayer help?
The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliation.
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