THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH-APRIL 2026 33 These charges were intertwined with concerns that China would benefit militarily from U.S. civil nuclear technologies, whether legally or illegally obtained. At the time of the indictment, China General Nuclear was developing floating nuclear power plants that Washington believed might give the Chinese military an advantage in the East and South China Seas. There were also long-standing concerns that China could divert U.S. power reactor technologies toward naval propulsion or use civil nuclear infrastructure to produce fissile material for weapons. Amid China’s nuclear and conventional military buildup as well as broader U.S.-China strategic rivalry, these concerns began to outweigh the perceived benefits of continued nuclear cooperation. Washington’s 2018 policy shift was in part a reflection of this new reality. Since then, rivalry has overshadowed the two countries’ long history of partnership in nuclear energy and nonproliferation. Export controls—an area in which the two countries used to cooperate in order to mitigate regional proliferation threats—have become an avenue of geopolitical and technological competition. The United States has added an increasing number of Chinese entities to its export control lists. In response, China is leveraging its dual-use export control system to threaten rare earth restrictions on the United States. Few remember that China set up the system in the 1990s under U.S. diplomatic pressure and with U.S. technical help. In November 2025, the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced that its prototype molten-salt reactor successfully demonstrated the conversion of thorium to uranium—a step that could extend available uranium resources. Commentaries regarding China’s thorium accomplishment trace the molten-salt concept to Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s pioneering work more than 50 years ago yet rarely highlight the much more recent U.S.- China collaboration. Nonproliferation diplomacy opened the door to civil nuclear commerce.
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