Missile Test By China ‘Soon'

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32016, 17 June 1969, Page 15

Missile Test By China ‘Soon '

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) LONDON, June 16. China is producing and will soon test a nuclear missile with a range of 6000 miles, according to a report published by the “Sunday Times.”

It is written by an Australian journalist, Francis James, who visited China’s Lop Nor nuclear testing site earlier this year and took pictures of missile and nuclear bomb plants. He quotes top Chinese scientists as saying that the country will have a secondstrike nuclear capability in the 19705.

The pictures, published by the “Sunday Times,” are believed to be the first of the top secret installations to reach a Western paper.

James is also the first Western journalist to be allowed into China's remote Sinkiang province—source of the country’s oil and uranium—for the last 10 years. James, who specialises in religious journalism, writes that one possible reason for the unprecedented facilities he received was because the Chinese wanted the rest of the world to hear about their development and preparedness.

He interviewed Dr Wei San-fu, a top scientist in the nuclear weapons programme, who denied rumours that Chinese workers had been killed in the H-bomb test in December, 1967.

He quotes Dr Wei as saying that the test, China’s seventh, was very small because it was to test a trigger for a new type of thermonuclear bomb. Some reports had said that the explosion failed and wiped out some workers.