A History of China's Plutonium Production

David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund January 16, 2003

This paper discusses the history of China’s production of plutonium for nuclear weapons, and uses that history and analogies to the production process in the United States and Russia to estimate the amount of plutonium China produced at its two known facilities. That analysis leads to an estimate that China produced 2 to 5 metric tons of plutonium at these facilities before it ceased production around 1990. The paper describes how the analysis was done and what assumptions were used so that a reader can understand how the results are affected by different assumptions or by new information that might become available.

Given the lack of information available about most aspects of China's nuclear weapon program, the estimate of plutonium production developed in this paper is necessarily rough. However, even a rough estimate is interesting since the size of China’s fissile material stockpiles will influence China's willingness to join a multilateral "cut-off" convention to ban future production of fissile material for weapons or outside of safeguards.

A version of this paper was published in Science and Global Security vol. 11, no. 1 (2003).