A new report from the U.S. Department of State on compliance with arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament was obtained by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. The report concluded that China may be violating international law by conducting low strength nuclear tests underground in the northwest part of the country. The report did not contain proof of treaty violations but did raise concerns. The report said, “Some compliance concerns are raised and some findings of violations are made.”
    Lop Nur is a Chinese test site. A high level of activity was observed at Lop Nur during 2019 and the Chinese may intend to operate the site continuously in the future. The report included comments on China’s use of explosive containment chambers, extensive evacuation of the site and a serious lack of transparency on nuclear testing as reasons that suspicions of illegal nuclear tests. Beijing blocked data transmission from sensors linked to a monitoring center maintained and operated by the international agency that is charged with verifying compliance with a treaty banning nuclear test explosions.
    A spokesperson for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organizations which verifies compliance with the pact told the Wall Street Journal that data transmissions had been interrupted in 2018 and were only restored by China in August of 2019.

    China may have violated the “zero yield” test ban at Lop Nur. Zero yield means that there is a test of nuclear weapons technology in which there is no explosive chain reaction of the type that would be ignited in a fully functional nuclear warhead detonation.
    The U.S. report also mentioned concerns about the possibility that China was violating the Biological Weapons Conventions (BWC) because they were involved in biological activities which had the potential for dual-use applications. The U.S. government was also unable to determine if China had shut down all of its biological warfare programs. It could not confirm whether or not Beijing still had such weapons because it lacks openness and transparency on this issue.
     China has been attracting attention lately over the way it has been handling the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. It is increasingly accepted that COVID-19 probably originated in a Wuhan laboratory. It is not claimed that China deliberately created COVID-19 as a bioweapon but rather that COVID-19 was created as part of the Chinese attempt to demonstrate its efforts to identify and combat viruses were equal or greater that the capabilities of U.S. laboratories.
    U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attacked the Chinese government for not being transparent with the rest of the world with respect to origins of COVID-19. Pompeo said, “We know that this virus originated in Wuhan, China. We know there is the Wuhan Institute of Virology just a handful of miles away from where the wet market was. There is still lots to learn. The United States government is working diligently to figure it out.”
   The Chinese government has rejected the U.S. accusations of illegal testing. China says that its nuclear warheads are only for defensive purposes.