Prepared by Edward Hurwitz, a Foreign Service officer and future ambassador then on assignment to INR, this report treated ICBMs as China’s main weapons goal, an eventual means for a “credible threat” to Beijing’s U.S. and Soviet “arch enemies.”

Only months after China’s first nuclear test in October 1964, INR looked into whether Beijing would help other nations get the bomb.

This “Limited Distribution” report on possible Japanese reactions did not anticipate that a test would cause basic changes in US-Japan security relations or in Tokyo’s general approach to nuclear weapons.

Subandrio writes a letter to Premier Zhou Enlai, praising the idea proposed in a previous message from China about holding a summit conference on general disarmament and banning of nuclear weapons. Subandrio suggests that the conference could have a higher chance of success if the 5 nuclear states (US, USSR, UK, France, and China) met prior to the summit.

Mostafa K. Tolba reports on China's nuclear policies in anticipation of an upcoming visit by the Secretary-General to China.

With nuclear proliferation a policy priority for the Jimmy Carter administration, and Pakistan already a special concern, the possibility that China and Pakistan were sharing nuclear weapons-related information began was beginning to worry US government officials. These concerns did not go away during the Reagan administration. While nuclear proliferation was not a top priority, the administration was apprehensive about the implications of the spread of nuclear capabilities and that China may have been aiding and abetting some potential proliferators by selling unsafeguarded nuclear materials.

With nuclear proliferation a policy priority for the Jimmy Carter administration, and Pakistan already a special concern, the possibility that China and Pakistan were sharing nuclear weapons-related information began was beginning to worry US government officials. They had no hard evidence--and the soft evidence that concerned them is massively excised in the December 1979 report just as Beijing and Washington were normalizing relations—so the “precise nature and extent of this cooperation is uncertain.”

This US analysis of the likelihood of nuclear proliferation during the next decade was finished only days after the first Chinese nuclear test on 16 October. The report analyses the implications of this test, as well as programs in India, Israel, Sweden, West Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, and others. The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) argued that India was the only new state likely to develop nuclear weapons, concluding that “there will not be a widespread proliferation …over the next decade.”