Mao: The Unknown Story

When Cairo asked for arms in December, China at once offered to donate whatever it produced, cost-free. But it could only make small arms such as rifles, and the offer was not taken up. Mao found himself left on the sidelines. All this made him more impatient to speed up his Superpower Program, and to possess the Bomb; otherwise, as he put it, “people just won’t listen to you.”

FOR THIS HE NEEDED Khrushchev. Luckily for Mao, Khrushchev needed him too. Hardly had the tumult in Poland and Hungary subsided than Khrushchev was faced with a domestic crisis. In June 1957, Molotov, Malenkov and a group of old Stalinists tried to overthrow him. Khrushchev thwarted the attempt, but felt he needed to get explicit support from foreign Communist parties. Other Communist leaders sent their endorsements promptly, but not Mao. So Khrushchev dispatched Mikoyan to see Mao, who was in the southern lake city of Hangzhou. “I think they wanted someone senior to come to them,” Mikoyan’s interpreter told us. Mao let Mikoyan talk for much of the night before gesturing languidly over his shoulder to his former ambassador to Moscow: “Old Wang [Jia-xiang], where’s our cable?” The telegram of support had been ready all the time. Mao would, of course, back Khrushchev, who was, after all, the power in the Kremlin. He just wanted to make Khrushchev plead, and to up his price. China immediately asked to renegotiate the technology transfer agreement.

Moscow responded extremely positively, saying that it was happy to help China build atom bombs, and missiles, as well as more advanced fighter planes. It turned out that Moscow needed even more support from Mao. The Communist world’s biggest-ever summit was set for 7 November, the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. For this event to go smoothly, Moscow had to have Mao on board.

Mao exploited this situation to the hilt. He said he would attend the summit only on condition that the Russians signed a prior agreement guaranteeing to hand over “the materials and the models for the production of an atomic weapon and the means to deliver it.” On 15 October, three weeks before the summit was to convene, Moscow signed a fateful deal agreeing to provide Mao with a sample A-bomb. Russian ministries were told “to supply the Chinese with everything they required to build their own Bomb.” So many missile experts were suddenly transferred to China that it caused “havoc” in Russia’s own program, according to one Russian expert. Russian experts also helped China choose missile and nuclear test sites deep in the interior.

Although the “father of the Russian Bomb,” Igor Kurchatov, strongly objected, Khrushchev sent a top nuclear scientist, Yevgenii Vorobyov, to supervise the construction of Mao’s Bomb, and during Vorobyov’s stay in China the number of Chinese nuclear specialists increased from 60 to 6,000. Russia “is willing to let us have all the blueprints,” Chou told a small circle. “Whatever it has made, including atom bombs and missiles, it is willing to give us. This is maximum trust, maximum help.” When Khrushchev later said: “they received a lot from us …” Mikoyan chipped in: “We built [nuclear weapons] plants for the Chinese.”

Soviet know-how enabled the Chinese to copy every shortcut the Russians had made, secure in the knowledge that these shortcuts worked, thus greatly speeding up Mao’s Bomb. China was the only country in the world that had anything like this level of help to manufacture nuclear weapons. Mao was told by his delegation just before the signing of the new agreement that with this degree of Russian assistance, he could possess all the attributes of a military superpower by the end of 1962. The undertaking cost a fortune. An authoritative Western source estimated the cost to China of making the Bomb alone at US$4.1 billion (in 1957 prices). A large part of this was paid for by agricultural products.

And Mao wanted more than the Bomb and missiles. On 4 October 1957, Russia launched a satellite called Sputnik, the first man-made object in space — and the first time the Communist world had “overtaken” the West in any technical sphere. Mao wanted to get into the space race right away. “Whatever happens, we must have Sputniks,” he announced to his top echelon in May 1958. “Not the one-kilo, two-kilo kind … it has to be several tens of thousands of kilos … We won’t do ones the size of chicken eggs like America’s.” The first US satellite, launched in January 1958, had weighed 8.22 kg, compared with Sputnik’s 83.6 kg. Mao wanted his to be bigger than either America’s or Russia’s, and he wanted it launched in 1960.