THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH-APRIL 2026 31 1960s. Zhang, however, was pursuing a different mission as he visited SLAC. President Nixon’s February 1972 visit to China had opened the door to bilateral scientific exchanges. In September 1972, Zhang received a directive from Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai to set up China’s national scientific program in high-energy physics. His visit to the United States just two months later was aimed at establishing scientific exchanges critical to China’s nascent high-energy physics endeavor. From 1973 onward, Chinese scientists regularly visited U.S. national laboratories and leveraged U.S. help in conducting basic scientific research while designing the large particle accelerator that would jump-start China’s experimental high-energy physics program. Panofsky provided critical input and was invited to join Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping at the accelerator’s groundbreaking ceremony in Beijing. He would later become an important U.S. participant in Track 1.5 and Track 2 nuclear diplomacy with China. U.S.-China Exchanges In 1979 informal U.S.-China scientific exchanges culminated in the Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technology— the first major agreement between the two governments following the establishment of formal diplomatic relations. Through successive implementing accords, cooperation under the agreement expanded from high-energy physics to magnetic fusion, and from nuclear physics to safety, security, nonproliferation, and energy sciences. Exchanges, while civilian-focused, spawned relationships between the two countries’ senior nuclear weapon scientists. Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Harold Agnew recalls meeting the deputy head of China’s nuclear weapon program in 1979, when the latter visited the United States with a Chinese Nuclear Society delegation. A separate delegation that visited Los Alamos the previous year included a Chinese nuclear physicist by the name of Yang Fujia, who later arranged for scientists and intelligence staff from the U.S. weapons lab and DOE to visit nearly all of China’s nuclear weapon facilities, from research reactors deep in the mountains of Sichuan to the northwestern Lop Nur test site. The information they gathered about the geology and depth of the Chinese testing tunnels would later allow the United States to more precisely estimate the yields of China’s nuclear weapons. In return, the Americans offered their knowledge in fissile material accounting and control, as well as arms control monitoring and verification. The 1990s lab-to-lab exchange program spearheaded by then–Los Alamos director Siegfried Hecker aimed to help keep Chinese weapons secure while reinforcing the country’s integration into the international nonproliferation and disarmament system. China had been intensely skeptical of this system prior to U.S. engagement. Celebrating its first atomic bomb test in 1964, Beijing dismissed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty ratified by the United States, United Kingdom, and USSR the previous year as “a big fraud to fool the people of the world” and “consolidate [their] nuclear monopoly.” Defying nonproliferation restrictions, China made nuclear transfers to countries outside the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards regime. This continued until the United States convinced China, via diplomatic engagement, to embrace nonproliferation and An aerial view of operating Westinghouse AP1000 units and CAP1000 units (the Chinese version of Westinghouse’s AP1000) under construction at the Haiyang Nuclear Power Plant in the Shandong province of China, 2024. WPTO
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