Red China: Fire Arrow

The Chinese invented explosives in the 9th century A.D., and the rocket 200 years later. Last week, a millennium after those breakthroughs, China announced it had brought both weapons together for the first time. Over the wind-whipped desert of Takla Makan, Peking claimed, a Chinese Communist A-bomb was carried aloft by a Chinese Communist missile and exploded some 500 miles away.

First news of the successful missile shot was flashed over Radio Peking in the dead of night. As if by Maoist magic, the Gate of Heavenly Peace was instantly floodlit, and a People's Daily "extra" was on the streets within the hour. Squads of People's Liberation Army soldiers goose-stepped through Peking, each man waving a tiny Red flag.

The world was quick to react. North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh called the Chinese test a "stimulus to the cause of world peace." United Nations Secretary General U Thant did not quite agree: "Any atomic explosion anywhere is to be regretted." Japan lodged its "deep regrets and strongest protests" over the test, which it described as another example of China's "rowing against the stream of the world." Perhaps in tacit agreement, Communist newspapers in Warsaw and Paris downplayed the news as much as possible, but Paris' independent Le Figaro pronounced China "in the fullest sense of the word a nuclear power."

Major Advance? What, precisely, had Peking wrought? Nothing more than Western intelligence sources had predicted all along: the Chinese have built a short-range nuclear missile. The Chinese bomb last week was a 20-kiloton device, about the same size as the Hiroshima bomb and considerably less powerful than the third Chinese A-bomb (130 kilotons) detonated last May. There was conflicting opinion among Western scientists as to whether or not the bomb had been reduced by its builders to the tiny, rugged component parts needed to carry a big bang in a small warhead. If the bomb was "miniaturized"—and it will be weeks before analysis of its fallout can reach any conclusion on that question —then China has accomplished a major advance in nuclear weaponry. The delivery system was the real mystery. Some skeptics suggested that Peking was stretching the truth and had simply lashed the device to a radio-controlled drone. Even in its claim, Peking was deliberately vague. The Chinese ideograms for a rocket translate as "fire arrow," but Peking's English translator rendered them as "guided missile." In Western terms, a guided missile is an anachronism: one of those winged, jet-propelled vehicles, like the Snark and the Navaho, that American aerospace companies were working on before the ballistic missiles like Minuteman and Titan were developed in the late 1950s. Some Western sources think the Chinese used a copy of the Russian SS-4 missile, a true rocket propelled by liquid fuel and capable of carrying a miniaturized nuclear warhead 1,000 miles. If the Chinese mounted an outsized atomic "device" on the SS-4 copy, it could well have cut the rocket's range to 500 miles.

The Radius. Whatever the technological facts, China's spectacular last week did little to alter the balance of raw thermonuclear power in the world. To be sure, a slight improvement by